Quotes About Memoir

My advisor in graduate school, Henry Louis Gates Jr., known as Skip, wrote about coming of age in a West Virginia mountain town in his memoir, Colored People. Like Albert Murray, he

My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, Peter Gay Nazi Berlin

Amos Oz, who would become one of Israel's greatest novelists and was several times considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, later recalled that night in his autobiographical memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He told how, merely eight years old, he rode on his father's shoulders in a surging crowd of celebrants in Jerusalem, and at three or four in the morning, still wearing his dirty clothes, crawled into bed.

That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.

No book has ever made me laugh as much as 'I, Partridge.'

J.R. Moehringer

I can just imagine the kind of book cover they'll insist on. Some really heroic pose by you doing something you never did, probably. Maybe in battle armor. With a gun." "Like that would ever happen. So if I die, you'll just write a memoir?" "No, I'll probably get a cat, too.

she talked in one of her memoirs of ignoring her little brother when she was supposed to be looking after him: "I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children...)

In the late 1960s, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade pulled back the veil cloaking her wartime activities in her gripping memoir, Noah's Ark, which was rightly described by MI6's Kenneth Cohen as "a Homeric saga" of her and Alliance's daily life under German occupation. But like Fourcade herself, the memoir is little known today.

There are several problems with this passage in the Volkov memoir, though. For one thing, only one page earlier, Volkov has Shostakovich say the opposite: "I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the 'Leningrad,' very quickly. I couldn't not write it. War was all around. . . .

EVERYONE WHO CAN should write a memoir, whether for publication or just to deposit in a drawer or beam to the cloud. There is drama in every life. Fame is irrelevant to one's worth and can sometimes be an obstacle to an appropriate appreciation of others. Further, the effort to reflect on our opportunities and choices is, for all of us, a challenge worth attempting.

Though I had never written a memoir, I was confident that given enough time, I could do a serviceable job. Not elegant, but blunt, informative and funnier than most readers would expect.

Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

the memoir-novel "dumbed down fiction and traduced

I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.

I do a lot of writing about my family.

I wasn't allowed to use people's real names, such as my siblings and my children's father, but there's nothing fabricated or untrue in my autobiography.

Writing a memoir isn't particularly interesting to me. I'm not like Ellen [DeGeneres], where I can write, 'Water bottles--they're crazy!' and it's funny.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those life-story writers I've met.

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.

When you write your memoir you will understand, perhaps for the first time, the significance of your life through the language, images and emotions you craft from the memory.

I began to think that some of us are the designated rememberers. Why do we remember? I don't know. But I think that's why memoir interests us—because we're the ones who pass the stories. --Pat Conroy