Memoir Quotes - Page 5

• 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

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• You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.

  Annie Dillard

  Pain, Drunk, Interesting

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• 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

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• Of all the many memoirs by former Soviet officials, Palazchenko's is among the best written and also the most objective. Even his descriptions of U.S. policy are more accurate and judicious than those of some American scholars.

  Jack F. Matlock, Jr.

  Description, Scholar, Accurate

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• North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms has signed a deal with Random House to write his memoirs. Scholars will no doubt benefit from the reflections of a man who was wrong on every major issue for 40 years. Helms' aides say the proceeds from the book will be donated to the non-profit Jesse Helms Center where they apparently have more experience burning than publishing them.

  Paul Begala

  Book, Writing, Reflection

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• I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

  Jim Harrison

  Writing, Would Be, Literature

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• Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Hero, Writing

  Samuel Johnson (1810). “The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With An essay on his life and genius”, p.406

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• The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction.

  Gary Shteyngart

  Fiction, Hell, Intense

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

  Gore Vidal

  Writing, Icy, Used

  Gore Vidal (2002). “The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000”, p.143, Vintage

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• Isn't this amazing? Clinton is getting $8M for his memoir, Hillary got $8M for her memoir. That is $16M for two people who for eight years couldn't remember anything.

  Jay Leno

  Eight, Years, Two

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• I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

  Paul Auster

  Winter, Thinking, Stories

  Time Out Interview, www.timeout.com.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Years, Giving

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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• 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.

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• 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

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• It [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story.

  Eve Ensler

  Book, Thinking, Expression

  "Interview with Eve Ensler: In The Body of the World". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 29, 2013.

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• Candid and searing, Deborah Jiang Stein’s memoir is a remarkable story about identity, lost and found, and about the author’s journey to reclaim—and celebrate—that most primal of relationships, the one between mother and child. I dare you to read this book without crying.

  Mira Bartok

  Mother, Children, Book

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• I love memoirs, particularly obscure ones because the writer is usually a regular guy just telling what happened to him and to his friends. What these tales lack in artfulness they make up for in passion and authenticity. For a writer of fiction, they are solid gold. I have stolen so much from memoirs it's ridiculous.

  Steven Pressfield

  Passion, Guy, Gold

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

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• Final installment of Things More Fun Than Reading the Sarah Palin Memoir: Driving into a tree, microwaving your head, and getting stabbed in the eye with a carrot.

  David Letterman

  Fun, Reading, Eye

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• Interest in reading memoirs is universal. What has happened is that people are writing about more and more outrageous things. Our threshold for weirdness - you can't have just a normal childhood - has gone way up.

  Sara Nelson

  Reading, Writing, People

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• The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

  Margaret Thatcher

  History, Politician, Hindsight

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