A Quote by Emily Gould

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

Emily Gould

Quote Topics

Aim Between Categories Deceive Distinction Fiction Marketing Meaningful Memoir Unless Your

Quote Author

Emily Gould
American - Novelist
Born: October 13, 1981

Distinction between species and specimen is very much like the distinction between images and actual pictures, or, you know, objects that have a definite material identity. The classifications, the categories, the stereotypes, and the images are on one side, and the material pictures, statues, texts, and so forth are on the other.

W. J. T. Mitchell

I can be very snobby about fiction, especially contemporary fiction. I can be kind of overly demanding, I think. But this is, I think, a good time. A lot of fiction comes out right now. So, I like reading the memoir. I love memoir, the biography, auto bio.

Annette Bening

A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

Julia Glass

Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions.

Farley Mowat

I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.

Armistead Maupin

Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.

Janice Erlbaum

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

Lidia Yuknavitch

We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift.

Pirjo Honkasalo

It is part of the business of marketing to muddy the distinction between altruism and cynicism.

Don Watson

In my mind, there isn't as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.

Abbas Kiarostami

Relationships can't blossom unless there is meaningful communication. That's why 'supplication is the key to worship.' It is a sign of meaningful communication between God and a person.

Suhaib Webb

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction.

Dinaw Mengestu

I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.

Lisa Scottoline

An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript - makes a difference in what books get picked up. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction titles. You need to show your publisher what you've got in your marketing arsenal.

M. J. Rose

I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated. Any time people have an argument about them, they're arguing about something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way that has to do with style or substance or actual content of books.

Emily Gould

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.