Quotes About Memoir

I'd fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so.

I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.

Tony Blair is an extremely popular figure in North America. His memoir is refreshing, both for its candour and vivid portrayal of political life.

I'm halfway through Patti Smith's memoir 'Just Kids,' which is heart-stoppingly vivid. It drips with beauty and hope and devastating candour. I don't want it to end.

What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.

I really didn't talk about my sexuality until I wrote my autobiography.

My celebrity memoir title: It Was the Worst of Times, It Was the Worst of Times.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel/memoir by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer that is every bit as charming as its title, and Island at War, a Masterpiece Theatre TV miniseries. In

Memory, memoir, autobiography - lies, lies, all lies.

'Duty' is a refreshingly honest memoir and a moving one. Mr. Gates scrupulously identifies his flaws and mistakes: He waited too long, for example, for the military bureaucracy to fix critical supply issues like the drones needed in Iraq and took three years to replace a dysfunctional command structure in Afghanistan.

Any well-written memoir is worth perusing with an eye to its structure.

Moving both backward and forward in time, re-creating believable dialogue, switching back and forth between scene and summary, and controlling the pace and tension of the story, the memoirist keeps her reader engaged by being an adept storyteller. So, memoir is really a kind of hybrid form with elements of both fiction and essay, in which the author's voice, musing conversationally on a true story, is all important.

Vivian Gornick's memoir Fierce Attachments

While imagination certainly plays a role in both kinds of writing, the application of it in memoir is circumscribed by the facts, while in fiction it is circumscribed by what the reader will believe.

Five Chimneys, by Olga Lengyel

These paradoxes, these Whitmanesque multitudes, helped make Thomas Merton one of the protean figures of twentieth-century Catholicism. His open and honest 1948 memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, which details his journey to the Trappist monastery, was a publishing phenomenon that even the savvy Merton was unable to foresee. It introduced contemplative prayer to millions of readers and heralded a postwar renewal in monastic life in the United States.

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.

All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful... If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There's a constant balance between those two.

I wrote 'Me and Ma' to celebrate a beautiful phase of my life with people.

I think 'Shoe Dog' by Phil Knight is the best memoir I've ever read by a business person.

It is such a luxury to open a new book that's highly recommended by friends - either an inspirational yet humorously self-deprecating memoir, or a page-turning piece of fiction.

'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls is the quintessential dysfunctional family.

I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'

Technically a memoir, 'The Woman Warrior' becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.