Memoir Quotes - Page 7

• I could never write my memoirs, just because too many people are still alive and would be hurt.

  Bruce Willis

  Hurt, Writing, People

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• Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Memories, Perspective, Wanted

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.

  Harry Shearer

  Merry Christmas, Night, White

  "How Harry Shearer Discovered the Soul of Richard Nixon". Interview with David Corn, www.motherjones.com. October 17, 2014.

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• With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it. Everything I write is the truth and I know that I would win.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Writing, Winning, Tvs

  Source: www.bookslut.com

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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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• A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

  Emma Donoghue

  Different, Situation, Novel

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• Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Book, Gray Area, Novel

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• One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you’ve learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning." Memoir From Antproof Case

  Mark Helprin

  Thinking, Life Is, Cases

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• America is subsidizing what is left of the prestige and strength of the once mighty Britain. The sun has set forever on that monocled, pith-helmeted resident colonialist, sipping tea with his delicate lady in the non-white colonies being systematically robbed of every valuable resource. Britain's superfluous royalty and nobility now exist by charging tourists to inspect the once baronial castles, and by selling memoirs, perfumes, autographs, titles, and even themselves.

  Malcolm X

  White, America, Forever

  Malcolm X (2015). “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, p.292, Ballantine Books

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• I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

  David Mitchell

  Book, Hero, Journey

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas: A Novel”, p.169, Random House

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• In her memoir, Anne Robinson recounts the wake-up call which motivated her to stop drinking. Leaving her eight-year-old daughter alone in their car while she went to buy liquor, she returned to find her daughter with tears running down her cheeks. The guilt and horror Ms. Robinson felt at this sight jolted her into sobriety.

  Anne Robinson

  Daughter, Running, Drinking

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• A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir.

  Tony Blankley

  Political, Honest, Persons

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• It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory.

  Arthur Schnitzler

  Memories, Writing, Easy

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• The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.

  Michiko Kakutani

  Art, Redemption, Crafts

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• The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.

  Jerry Stahl

  Heart, Eye, Reality

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• No one who reads this book will remain unchanged or unaffected-Julene Bair's story arcs from the cornfields of Kansas and Nebraska to the food on our tables and the gas in our cars. There is always a price to be paid, she reminds us, for the pleasures and comforts of this day.  If you read only one memoir this year, this is the one to read and pass along.

  Jonis Agee

  Book, Kansas, Years

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• I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.

  Rosemary Mahoney

  Thinking, Mets, Persons

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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 don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

  Paul Auster

  Use, Wanted, Publishers

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• I dont know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, its always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

  Koren Zailckas

  Writing, Ideas, Cracks

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• Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

  Patricia Hampl

  Humble, Night, Knitting

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• The journey toward authenticity, toward becoming whole is made palpable in Maureen Seaton's Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir. It shines its considerable light on the passage from religion toward faith, from self-medication to sobriety, from daughterhood to motherhood, from being the disembodied 'good girl' to embracing her own bad lesbian self. In crisp chapters, Seaton leads us, step-by-step, over this harrowing and blissful road, so distinct from yet so much like our own.

  Terry Wolverton

  Girl, Sex, Motherhood

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• Clyde Phillip Wachsberger's delightful memoir about tending beds of flowers as compensation for a lonely middle age only to find unexpected romance along the way is a sweet reminder that, as he puts it, 'anything can happen in a garden.' In prose that balances candor with perfect courtesy, he charms us with the message that keeping a garden with a beloved companion, this most ephemeral of all the arts, can bring us the most enduring joys and pleasures.

  Philip Gambone

  Lonely, Sweet, Art

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• I've read my grandmother's memoirs and she served as a nurse during World War II. What they had to do was incredible.

  Jessica Brown Findlay

  War, Grandmother, Nurse

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

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