Quotes About Memoir

was to keep a record of the voyage, not the dry, factual pilot's log, but a more personal, anecdotal

James Herriot

James Herriot

Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter, he

I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.

Being a female hard rocker and guitar player, I felt the need to put out a memoir. Almost like a rock 'n' roll women manual for women.

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

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.

I stayed at 'Cosmo' well beyond my internship, moving up the ranks over some 15 years to become books editor, then brand director, then editor-at-large - editing everything from an excerpt of Gore Vidal's memoir to writing some of those juicy cover lines myself.

break his hold on power, as…we had come to expect," the first president Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, wrote in their 1998 joint memoir, A World Transformed. Third, the U.S. military didn't

Why keep a record when you can not keep a record?

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.

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

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

He was released in 2006, and his memoir, the book for which he was getting the prize in Dayton, In the Place of Justice, tells his story, from being a confused kid caught in a bank robbery gone bad, to a man who had fully taken

I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and what your hopes and dreams were."-

Loomis, the longest-tenured Time, Inc., employee, still worked at the magazine while I was researching this book, and when I asked her about Cobb, with whom she'd also gone on a second date to an old-timers game at Yankee Stadium, she directed me toward a memoir she'd written in which she described him as "smart and gentlemanly." He'd been deeply impressed, she said, with her knowledge of baseball.

In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it's a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.

There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction. This may very well describe why we write memoir, for it is often in the delayed reaction, long after the actual living, that we can fully savor the fruits of our experience. [Foreword of Shimmering Images by Lisa Dale Norton]

I've spent my life writing and now I'm writing about my life." HANNAH COLLINS - AUTHOR