Quotes About Memoirs

I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.

When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for Memoirs . There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, "My tits are on fire").

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

Soap wasn't invented until the Romans, who also invented interesting sex. (Since my editor informs me that a gardening book is not a proper venue for discussions of interesting sex, I will go into this topic in more detail when I write my private memoirs, 'A Petunia Named Desire').

I have not written my memoirs for those young people who can only save themselves from falling by spending their youth in ignorance, but for those whom experience of life has rendered proof against being seduced, whom living in the fire has transformed into salamanders.

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end.

Memoirs, as everyone knows, make bad history.

I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.

From the essay Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

You might say presidents are drafting the first chapter of their memoirs in these seventh-year State of the Union addresses. They're trying to get the public and the media to think about their presidencies in the way that they would like to have them thought of.

I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.

I was inspired by my life. I was inspired by the lives of many women doctors around me. So [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor ] is a mixture.

Fidel Castro disclosed that he was reading Churchill's World War II memoirs. "If Churchill hadn't done what he did to defeat the Nazis, you wouldn't be here, none of us would be here," he told a crowd that had gathered to see the new Cuban leader when he visited a Havana bookstore. "What is more, we have to take a special interest in him because he, too, led a little island against a great enemy." Another surprising fan

Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.

she ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study; and on being requested to particularise, mentioned such works by our best moralists, such collections of fine letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind.

I read contrived memoirs by presidential candidates. For every 'Dreams From My Father' - Barack Obama's honest, literary portrayal of his biracial upbringing - there were a dozen cautious, formulaic vanity projects by politicians.

Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.