Memoir Quotes - Page 5

• My memoir is being published by Beaufort Books and will be available fall of 2015. Its about my unusual life as a child actor and how I made the unpopular choice to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.

  Lisa Jakub

  Children, Growing Up, Book

  4 Copy quote

• My memoir is about my time in film and the decision to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.

  Lisa Jakub

  Growing Up, Decision, Hollywood

  4 Copy quote

• My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.

  Manuel Puig

  Writing, Literature, Fantasy

  7 Copy quote

• I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.

  Sally Ride

  Television, Made, Havens

  "A Conversation With Sally Ride; Painful Questions From an Ex-astronaut" by Claudia Dreifus, www.nytimes.com. August 26, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When Goldie Hawn wrote her memoirs, no one said Goldie Hawn was snitching. When Jane Fonda wrote her memoirs, no one said Jane Fonda was snitching.

  Karrine Steffans

  Snitch, Said, Jane

  4 Copy quote

• I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Fiction, Stories

  Source: www.believermag.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph.

  Janice Erlbaum

  Pain, Powerful, Past

  6 Copy quote

• We all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That's a kind of personal story of mine that I don't think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Heart, Thinking, Interesting

  "Elizabeth Gilbert, ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Author, On What It Takes To Get Inspired". Interview with Chantal Pierrat, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 11, 2013.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Queens, Writing, Prom Queen

  4 Copy quote

• I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.

  Nick Earls

  Real, Writing, Magazines

  Source: www.stephbowe.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Men, Giving, Faithful

  Henryk Sienkiewicz (1897). “Without Dogma: A Novel of Modern Poland”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Taken, Writing, Thinking

  Source: content.time.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.

  Paul Auster

  Independent, Winter, America

  Interview with Wayne Gooderham, www.timeout.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Morning, Book, Yellow

  "Brown : The Last Discovery of America". Book by Richard Rodriguez, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Jim Grimsley's unflinching self-examination of his own boyhood racial prejudices during the era of school desegregation is one of the most compelling memoirs of recent years. Vivid, precise, and utterly honest, How I Shed My Skin is a time-machine of sorts, a reminder that our past is every bit as complex as our present, and that broad cultural changes are often intimate, personal, and idiosyncratic.

  Dinty W. Moore

  School, Past, Self

  4 Copy quote

• Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers some hard truths about the heroic founders of Israel and the Beginnings of Israeli science. The Book of Telling keeps in all the fears and resentments and consolations and warmth of such a process-at once her own story and the tale of a nation.

  Edmund White

  Father, Book, Israel

  4 Copy quote

• Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Book, Diaries, Letters

  4 Copy quote

• Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do - and getting to take on that life temporarily - is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir.

  Hilary Liftin

  Writing, Interesting, Way

  "'Getting to Take on That Life Temporarily'". Interview with Kathryn Borel, Jr., logger.believermag.com. July 21, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think people dismiss celebrity memoirs as unreal, contrived and maybe partially made up. But that's definitely not true for anything that I write.

  Hilary Liftin

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "'Getting to Take on That Life Temporarily'". Interview with Kathryn Borel, Jr., logger.believermag.com. July 21, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

  Paul Auster

  Memories, Fake, Details

  Time Out Interview, www.timeout.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My children haven't read 'Winter Journal'. They have read some of my work, but I really don't foist it on them. I want them to be free to discover it in their own good time. I think reading an intimate memoir by your father - or an intimate autobiographical work, whatever we want to call this thing - you have to come at it at the right moment, so I'm certainly not foisting it upon them.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Father, Reading

  Source: www.timeout.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

  James Thurber

  Flower, Writing, Leaving

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.149, Library of America

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you're going to do a memoir, then it's sort of at this age - in your late sixties or seventies - that you do it. I don't understand people who do memoirs when they're 20. I think most people need a little more time than 20 years to become the person they are. In fact, that process of becoming who you are is still ongoing when you get older, where you go, "Let's see where my next 10 years is going to take me." S

  Grace Coddington

  Thinking, Years, Becoming Who You Are

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.

  George Eliot

  Mistake, Men, World

  George Eliot (1860). “Life and Letters”, p.654

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I read a lot. I especially read memoirs and biographies. It's very helpful when you're thinking about what's possible and what exists in human behavior; if it exists out there then it can exist on the stage. I really try to go to a lot of concerts. A lot of live events. I just try to keep my ears really, really open.

  Jeanine Tesori

  Thinking, Trying, Events

  "Composer Jeanine Tesori on Her Artistic Process and Rewarding Female Ambition". Interview with Victoria Myers, www.indiewire.com. March 27, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source