A Quote by Ishmael Beah

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.

Ishmael Beah

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About After Another Because Bit Book Exhausted Felt First Gone Himself Long Long Way Many Me Memoir Might Pulling Radiance Row Same Same Time Sane Speak Story Time Tomorrow Want Way Write Wrote Years

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Ishmael Beah
Sierra Leonean - Author
Born: November 23, 1980

A lot of my songs are very personal, always, but this one felt like a memoir. I almost called it Hallucinated Memoir. "Granny" is a hallucinated memoir. It's straight-up symbolism for my life, in many ways.

Vic Chesnutt

I never felt inspired to write this book [ I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?], like I did with the cat or dog book; I felt compelled. At the time (May 1999), I was planning to write and illustrate an altogether different memoir, a book about my decision whether or not to have a baby.

Suzy Becker

The memoir industry is, what's the word? Under regulated. I think it needs to be pruned. If there are too many books right now and the market for readers is shrinking, I think we can get rid of many of the memoirs. Another memoir should be awfully well justified before it gets published.

Arthur Phillips

There are so many stories that need to be told and are not being told. We tend to want to put things in boxes: "This is a memoir about a Muslim," or "This is a memoir about a woman or a normal personal." There's a certain story that assumes to be universal. Everyone else is ethnic fiction. Anyone can aspire to universality.

Haroon Moghul

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

Jesmyn Ward

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

Rachel Cusk

I didn't write the memoir with any sort of intention of feeling better. I wrote the memoir because I had a weird need to write a good story. But once I was done, I did feel better about myself. Not better, just calmer. Because a tremendous onus had been lifted off my day-to-day.

Leigh Newman

It [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story.

Eve Ensler

I wrote Her First American and I always say it took me eighteen years. It took me that long was because after about five years I stopped and wrote Lucinella. I got stuck; it was too hard to write. Lucinella felt like a lark. I wanted to write about the literary circle because it amused me, and I allowed myself to do what I wanted to do. It's just one of the things I'm allowed to do if I feel like it.

Lore Segal

You write a book, it's out for however many years, and with the passing of time, you're not the same person. I'm not the same person I was when I wrote those books; I'm not even the same person I was when I started writing 'Beg.' I had many shifts spiritually, and one of them was in the use of language.

Rory Freedman

I did the first proofreading of 'A Brief History of Time,' and when it came to writing my memoir, I consulted many scientific friends so that, contrary to what many critics supposed and were churlish enough to voice, I did actually write the scientific sections myself.

Jane Hawking

If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.

Frederick Busch

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

I would never do a printed memoir. I've been asked to publish a memoir from years by different publishers and literary agents. I think it wouldn't be great for me because all I'd really want to talk about it music and I'd rather just play it.

Natalie Merchant

I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir. One reason is the great love of novels that I keep droning on about. I've always loved reading novels. I've wanted to write novels since I was little. I started my first novel when I was seven.I don't have the same connection to memoir or nonfiction or essays. Writing nonfiction makes me feel a little bit as if I'm producing a product I don't consume - it's a really alienating feeling.

Elif Batuman

In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.

Margo Jefferson

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