Memoir Quotes - Page 13

• Stalin didn't write any memoirs. He was too secretive. He was afraid people might read them.

  Jonathan Lynn

  Funny, Humorous, Writing

  Jonathan Lynn, Antony Jay (1988). “The complete Yes, Minister: the diaries of a cabinet minister”, HarperCollins

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• I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Writing, Thinking, People

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• I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Sex, Thinking, Literature

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• When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.

  Dave Eggers

  Voice, Stories, Sometimes

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• I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

  Peter Carey

  Writing, Selfishness, Here And There

  "An Interview With Author Peter Carey". Interview with Ben Evans, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 6, 2010.

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• I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

  Brett Davern

  Autobiography

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• Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing.

  Barry Eichengreen

  Government, Two, Effort

  "US unemployment: some lessons in sharing from the Great Depression" by Barry Eichengreen, www.theguardian.com. June 12, 2012.

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• I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.

  Joe Eszterhas

  Past, Directors, Prime

  "I felt I had befouled myself" by Duncan Campbell, www.theguardian.com. January 30, 2004.

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• When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.

  Tayari Jones

  Lying, Fiction, Want

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• I'm very detail oriented. I think that's why people enjoy my memoirs - because I tend to remember everything.

  Jen Lancaster

  Thinking, Remembers Everything, People

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• People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

  Mark Leyner

  Believe, Writing, Thinking

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• People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

  Anthony Powell

  Thinking, People, Biographies

  Anthony Powell (2010). “Hearing Secret Harmonies: Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time”, p.84, University of Chicago Press

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• When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Writing, Unique, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Art, Issues, Water

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Real, Writing, Heart

  Source: therumpus.net

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• On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I've seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature - why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Writing, Doors, Entering

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Doe, Fiction, Sometimes

  Source: therumpus.net

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• One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Strategy, Form, Live By

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric - but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her "life" boundaries.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Communication, Talking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only "real" in the space of the text.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Real, Successful, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Projects, Form, Greater

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Mistake, Drawing, Amplify

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The best memoirs - like This Boy's Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance - bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation - the forms and strategies of storytelling - are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Crazy, Ocean, Struggle

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Self, Looks, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I cut a lot of cringy sex stuff and a lot of stuff I thought was too personal. I think secret gardens are very special. I think we all have to have them. I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.

  Damian Barr

  Sex, Cutting, Garden

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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