Memoir Quotes - Page 11

• Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.

  Jane Fonda

  Writing, Thinking, Use

  "Jane Fonda, Fitness Guru, Reveals What Inspires Her In Origin Magazine Interview". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 15, 2013.

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• I love to read long books. I enjoy experiencing that extension. But it's not something I feel comfortable with and not something I think I can gain comfort with by practice. It was a real struggle for me while writing memoir to get past three pages or so. In poems, I can write long poems. But length in prose: no.

  Shane McCrae

  Real, Book, Struggle

  Source: therumpus.net

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• A producer came to me about doing a memoir, and at first I thought, "Well, it's a little bland." But then I realized that almost everything that's happened to me was the result of being in the right place at the right time. And I thought "Well, luck has a lot to do with it," so I wrote it from that perspective.

  Dick Van Dyke

  Perspective, Luck, Producers

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• Bob Dylan wrote in his elliptical memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he was washed up in the 1980s, no longer a commercial success, and no longer putting out good work.

  Bob Dylan

  Bob, Good Work, Volume

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Doe, Body, Female

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Ambition, Track, Decision

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  California, Desire, Asia

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• I was astonished to find that the positions my grandfather had defended were now overgrown and entangled with trees and thorns. I suppose I had developed a sense of reverence for the locations he described in his memoirs and letters - the forts and the high emplacements. I had expected them to have been preserved in some way.

  Chris Cleave

  Tree, Grandfather, Location

  "'We Don't Know Our Hearts Until Life Puts Us to the Test'--Chris Cleave on 'Everyone Brave Is Forgiven'". Interview With Erin Kodicek, www.amazonbookreview.com. May 31, 2016.

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• [Barack] Obama isn't pointing to anyone, and certainly doesn't like it when others note (correctly) that his influences were the likes of Saul Alinsky, the Chicagoan and modern founder of community organizing, or Frank Marshall Davis, the communist journalist and agitator from Chicago who mentored Obama in Hawaii in the latter 1970s, and who Obama warmly acknowledges in his memoirs.

  Paul Kengor

  Community, Chicago, Hawaii

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

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• My memoirs are full of humor, I had to change jokes because it was a little too dark.

  Marina Abramovic

  Dark, Littles, Jokes

  Source: www.marieclaire.com

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• [Madness] happened so frequently. I think what I was most maddest about - and it's in the book [Speaking Freely: A Memoir] - when the House and the Senate, back in 1984, were debating a bill that would - at least delay and maybe stop some of the ex - summary execution of disabled children - infants. And the Down syndrome kids and other kids had been, in some cases, routinely let die, to use the euphemism.

  Nat Hentoff

  Children, Book, Kids

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

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• One of the things I write about a bit in my Madam Secretary memoir is on Rwanda, where I was an instructed ambassador at the U.N., and my instructions were to not vote for increased forces there, and I didn't like my instructions. So I got up and called Washington and said, "Change my instructions," and they didn't.

  Madeleine Albright

  Writing, Ambassadors, Vote

  Source: www.chicagomaroon.com

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• [John Carlos] has spent much of his life since that time as a dedicated human rights advocate and public speaker, and he is out now with a wonderful new text; a memoir, in fact.

  Tavis Smiley

  Rights, Facts, Wonderful

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I never felt inspired to write this book [ I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?], like I did with the cat or dog book; I felt compelled. At the time (May 1999), I was planning to write and illustrate an altogether different memoir, a book about my decision whether or not to have a baby.

  Suzy Becker

  Dog, Baby, Book

  Source: bookpage.com

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• I was inspired by my life. I was inspired by the lives of many women doctors around me. So [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor ] is a mixture.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Doctors, Mixtures, Inspired

  Source: muse.jhu.edu

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• People like [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor], whether young people, young women, even critics - male critics - they were not shocked by it. Of course, some parts were cut.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Cutting, Doctors, People

  Source: muse.jhu.edu

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• The parts in which I elaborated on the sexual life of the doctor herself, the personal life, her relation with men [in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor]. All this. They left only some very, very minute parts. And also the political, the political element in it. So in a way, they cut pieces that to my mind were very important.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Cutting, Men, Doctors

  Source: muse.jhu.edu

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• You know, people talk about [Richard] Nixon's "madman theory." We don't really know much about that. It was in memoirs, by somebody else.

  Noam Chomsky

  People, Theory, Madmen

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Character, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Memoirs need confusion. It's the thing every human has in common. We are magnificently confused.

  Joshua Mohr

  Confused, Confusion, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Germany was a parliamentary democracy with many, many humane and decent people who kept writing in their journals - I've read these journals, these memoirs - "Surely our leaders will stop this nonsense. Surely someone will take on these thugs. Surely the pendulum will swing back." Everyone was sitting at home going, "Well, they haven't come for me. This is crazy, but surely someone's going to take care of it." We all have to take care of it.

  Naomi Wolf

  Crazy, Home, Writing

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I was always worried about the dishonesty and meretriciousness that often accompanies ego. So I tried to make the memoir as factual and accurate and as unemotional as I could, and let readers make their own judgments on what happened. And, in fact, that's how I write poetry. I'm trying to present the reader with the experience itself, not with my commentary on it. So I adopted a style that I'd hoped would let me accomplish that.

  Dan Burt

  Writing, Ego, Style

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.

  Melissa Holbrook Pierson

  Art, Book, Creativity

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• I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Cancer, Months, Fourteen

  "The Writing Life". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. July 19, 2016.

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• I admire Joyce Maynard a lot, specifically her memoir "At Home in the World." Her writing is beautiful and fascinating and seemed to give me validation to the idea that I could write validly in earnest about my life with (my) very feminine point of view, and also that I could unapologetically explore the bad traits of my character (which I find to be more interesting to explore than the good traits), as well as explore other concepts that interest me like private vs public personas, age gap relationships, etc.

  Marie Calloway

  Beautiful, Home, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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