Quotes About Memoirs

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

The FBI—not for the first time—had produced evidence that undermined a presidency. "No one was more shocked and angry than I," Bush wrote in his memoirs. "I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

Churchill said that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it himself. Yet in his vast histories and memoirs, he presented his own decisions as self-evident, and credited the British people and Britain's allies. Today what Churchill did seems normal, and right. But at the time he had to stand out.

Few qualms of conscience are to be found in the memoirs of those who exercised command in the wars for highly questionable causes that Britain and the U.S.A. waged in the nineteenth century.

Where this living death doesn't exist, life takes its place. Just as the person who loses his shadow becomes the shadow of himself. ('The shadow of himself - that would be a fine title. With the subtitle: 'Memoirs of a double life'.)

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

I like the freedom of novels. With the memoirs, I always had to keep to the facts. I like that with novels, if I want to go off and write something quite dramatic or outrageous or something completely different, I can do it if I want to.

Perhaps the reason memoirs are so often written by the young these days is that, once you reach a certain age, only fiction might allow you to truly make your way back to childhood.

One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants' diaries.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

He who believes that the past cannot be changed has not yet written his memoirs.

A remarkable number of the memoirs of booksellers are basically anecdote delivery devices.

Bastards have pissed me off," Reed snarled, out of breath, as he backed into the open armory door. "They hit me in the face." Lang grabbed Reed's jaw, turned his face toward him. "It's just a scratch." It's just my fucking face ," Reed sputtered. "It needs to look good on a book jacket when I write my memoirs someday.

Wellington wrote in his memoirs,' said Old Jack, 'that the worst moment of any campaign is waiting for the sun to rise on the morning of battle.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

All of Wes Anderson's films are confections, memoirs created in cinematic snow globes, with the subtext that memory is the most extraordinary confection of all.

It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.

Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.

I like autobiographies. I wouldn't mind making one of those.

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.

Gelsey Kirkland has had more than her share of demons, as her two distressing memoirs - and her violently checkered career - attest.

One day I'm going to use this experience in my memoirs [...]. Is when a famous person writes about their life and describes the bad stuff they went through. It's important to have enough bad stuff or it just seems like bragging, and no one likes that. So messing up today that's really helpful, because is shows that I'm human.