Quotes About Memoir

Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972); and John E. Washington, They Knew Lincoln (New York: Dutton, 1942). Of course, no work was more important than Elizabeth Keckley's own memoir, Behind the Scenes (New York, G. W. Carleton & Company

I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another "useful fiction," and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I'm saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close.

Memoirs and historical monographs by New Left historians painted a virginal portrait of radical protesters, rewriting the history of the period on a scale that would have seemed impossible outside the Communist bloc. In his own memoir, Hayden includes pages of excerpts from his FBI file, interspersed with disingenuous presentations of his political career that keep his readers in the dark about many of the far-from-innocent activities in which he actual1y engaged.

I didn't write autobiography. I wrote to leave autobiography behind.

The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.

February 13, 1989 Chicago Tonight at Barbara's Bookstore, Tobias Wolff read from his new memoir, This Boy's Life.

my family's asshole.

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom.

The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochure from brilliance, memo from memoir, a ship's log from The Old Man and the Sea .…The writer leaves us with a sense that we are listening to a skilled raconteur rather than passing our eyes over ink on paper.

I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.

'Confessions of a Video Vixen' is not a book about my encounters with celebrities, or anyone else for that matter. It is my life story, thus far, which just so happens to include some people you may have heard of.

Aren't you afraid of ghosts?" I asked. Over the line, in the silence, the static hissed. "You aren't afraid of the things you believe in," he said. This, too, I wrote in his memoir, even though I had not understood what he meant.

The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.

Sofka: The Autobiography of a Princess, a book

All of my films have been autobiographical - it's all I've got to go on.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

I've been asked to write my autobiography, but I've not been interested.

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.