Quotes About Memoir

Famed value investor Guy Spier has managed to write what is both a gripping memoir and a fascinating study of what it takes to succeed in investing and life. A must read!

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.

I told my whole life story in my book.

Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do - and getting to take on that life temporarily - is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir.

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

My life and my legs have been an open book.

Mary had written a memoir in 1959, making it easy for me to scratch the surface of her life. I found a dog-eared copy at the Strand Book Store downtown, read it, and was hooked. She was smart, witty, and self-denigrating.

when the Internet made it possible, I was in touch with her daughter, Marylyn, who was living in a mobile home in Utah with a companion. She was the grandmother of eighteen children and the great-grandmother of twenty-two. In what she said online, Marylyn had nothing but kind words to say about both parents, upsetting my conviction, after reading Mary's memoir, that Daddy was the bad guy.

In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.

The first thing to be said about 'Prague Winter,' former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's new book, is that she very wisely chooses to confront early on in it her apparent surprise at learning late in life that she was born Jewish.

At its best, fiction cultivates fantasy and compassion; at its worst, memoir provokes schadenfreude and prurience. The ugly truth, I fear, is that many people are drawn to sensational memoirs for the same reason they watch 'The Apprentice': they like to witness actual suffering, before-your-very-eyes humiliation.

Iwould say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false.

John Dominic Crossan wrote in the concluding chapter, "Mine Eyes Decline the Glory," of his wonderful memoir, A Long Way From Tipperary [2000]. I'll just read this:

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I could write "I don't know" one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.

Susan Alexie died of tuberculosis on August 30, 1945. I don't know why the exact date of her death is not on her gravestone. Perhaps it had been about money. Those extra letters and numbers might have been too expensive. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I could write I don't know one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.

Nobody's life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.

I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

I'm just basically telling a story of my life.

My book has a lot of parts of my life that people don't know about.

McCracken's latest novel straddles the line between fiction and memoir, though she rejects the term "autofiction" as sounding "like it might be written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European.

I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.