Quotes About Memoir

When I first got sick, they told me I had a year to live, and I was writing my memoir really fast. There were really weird things happening with my nervous system and my heart and stuff, and it didn't look like I was gonna make it, so I was writing really fast, and then I couldn't write anymore.

Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'

I wanted to tell the story of Luong Ung, who's a dear friend of mine.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

Today, of course, popular culture is on a culinary binge; and so much personal writing is now devoted to gazing back upon the kitchen and the table that we've had to invent a new literary genre, the food memoir, to contain all of it.

The House at Sugar Beach, New York Times reporter Helene Cooper's memoir of her girlhood as a member of the Liberian upper crust.

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. "So that's what war looks like!" von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, "We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.

For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.

I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.

A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy.

If I am going to write a book, which I have done, I think we have to get it right - whatever has been written about me, about football, about my private life.

I didn't write the book to sell the book, but to tell my experiences.

Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.

Heartbreaking and brave, Rachel Resnick masterfully pulls the past to the present, exploring how the seeds of addiction planted during an unhappy girlhood can blossom into a grown-up woman's frantic search for love. LOVE JUNKIE is a memoir unlike any other; it will blow your mind.

My autobiography was simply the story of my life.

All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

One of my favourite books of all time is 'The Borstal Boy.'

I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.

The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.

A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.

The term 'celebrity memoir' has gotten such a bad name now, but there used to be a little bit of an art form to it.