Top 101 Memoir Quotes

If you write memoir, it can’t be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

I think ‘Shoe Dog’ by Phil Knight is the best memoir I’ve ever read by a business person.

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.

I don’t know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it’s always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

If I wrote a memoir, it would be like ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.’

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.

I have always felt a special affinity with V. S. Pritchett. He worked from the ear, primarily, as I do, and he was an all-rounder, writing short stories, novels, memoir, travelogue, critical biography. He lived to be almost 100, and he never stopped, and his work is unified by a great generosity of spirit.

I don’t like memoirs. I think they’re self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.

‘Amazing Grace’ is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It’s a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don’t think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.

After I wrote my memoir, ‘A Long Way Gone,’ I was a bit exhausted. I didn’t want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of ‘Radiance of Tomorrow’ pulling at me because of the first book.

A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.

The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn’t on the surface.

When you write a memoir, and it’s your life, and you’re exposing things that are close to home, it’s hard to see it changed.

I’m a layperson. I barely got out of high school. I have no business telling people what to do or my big philosophy on life. I’m certainly not going to write any sort of memoir.

You’re beginning to hear the tale of the common man and woman rather than the traditional memoir about the generals who just finished the war or the politicians who just rendered glorious service to the country.

Cheney’s memoir is not about 9/11, or solely about Bush’s administration, but about his entire life and political career.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It’s just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

I don’t think anybody would be interested in my memoir – and my memory isn’t very good either!

By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn’t preachy.

A memoir is not an autobiography. It’s a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he’s writing a novel. But it’s got to be true.

For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting – you want to tell people something they don’t know about.

I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.

What is most important to me is that my narrator’s voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.

It’s weird being an author because it’s different than writing songs. You put so much more of yourself out there to be judged because it’s a memoir. So when the reviews come in, they all feel really personal. Some people are just going to hate you no matter what. Personally, I never believe good reviews.

Tony Blair is an extremely popular figure in North America. His memoir is refreshing, both for its candour and vivid portrayal of political life.

A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that’s what separates a life story that can influence other people.

It is important to understand how leaders have adapted and thought about war and warfare across their careers. ‘The Autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War’ is perhaps the best war memoir ever written.

I’d worked at the White House for two years, and I’d read a bunch of White House memoirs because everybody who works at the White House, even for five minutes, writes a memoir usually not less than 600 pages long – and never without the word ‘power’ in the title.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

That’s all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven’t figured out yet. And that’s one of the things I’m hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

Well I’m not a novelist. I’ve only written one book and that is a memoir.

I don’t know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it’s always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia.

I had wanted to write ‘The Possessed’ as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, ‘No, you have to call this a memoir.’

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

I’m halfway through Patti Smith’s memoir ‘Just Kids,’ which is heart-stoppingly vivid. It drips with beauty and hope and devastating candour. I don’t want it to end.

Before I’m a writer, I’m definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I’m creating a form of fiction.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

Not to be too ‘Tale of Two Cities’ about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

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

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.

Charles Blow’s memoir ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ was a breathtaking piece of writing.

‘Dreams from My Father’ was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.

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.

It is such a luxury to open a new book that’s highly recommended by friends – either an inspirational yet humorously self-deprecating memoir, or a page-turning piece of fiction.

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity – as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it’s certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.

Autobiography should be more stringent. It should adhere more to the standards of journalism – assuming that journalism has the truth. The memoir gives you more scope, is more poetic, and allows you to play around with your own life.