Quotes About Memoirs

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

What George W. Bush learned in his pre-presidential years - and what he omits in his new memoirs - was not how to lead a nation, but how, with sufficient toughness, to cheat the democratic system to get elected.

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

Goldman laid low until the 1927 executions of anarchists and convicted bank robbers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti stirred her back into action. With the support of admirers such as novelist Theodore Dreiser and philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim, Goldman began to write her memoirs as a way to reach the public in America. If she could not reach its shores, at least her words could.

Keynes preferred memoirs as 'more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel'.

autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.

A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.

It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.

The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write.

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

I'm going to write a book about an intelligent woman who does stupid things when it comes to men. I'll call it, "My Memoirs.

Now we commissioned William Shawcross, a tall, gangly Brit, to review Kissinger's memoirs. Willie's father had been the British chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. After an Eton and Oxford education, Willie, who was just my age, had become an international activist and journalist.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

I don't think my husband has any plans to pen his memoirs. There are enough people doing that for him.

I surmised that this project would prove a mistake, like Mr. Churchill's attempt to take Gallipoli in 1915, but it would be the kind of mistake that would look good in his memoirs.

To write your memoirs is to draw up a balance sheet of your life so far.

Men's memoirs are about answers; women's memoirs are about questions. Most male authors want to look good in their memoirs and have a place in posterity, while most women know that posterity is what happens when you no longer care. Women want to connect with others here and now; they couldn't care less about legacy!

I rent a Jacobean-fronted hunting lodge in Hampshire from the National Trust and like to go there as much as possible. I've grown to love it so much, especially when writing my memoirs there at weekends.

I have been presented with roles with demand not just a physical ability but mental disciplines as well. 'Memoirs of a Geisha' was not so much about physical exertion... it was much more graceful and contained than that.

'Memoirs of a Geisha' is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.

It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state.