A Quote by Steven Pressfield

I love memoirs, particularly obscure ones because the writer is usually a regular guy just telling what happened to him and to his friends. What these tales lack in artfulness they make up for in passion and authenticity. For a writer of fiction, they are solid gold. I have stolen so much from memoirs it's ridiculous.

Steven Pressfield

Quote Topics

Authenticity Because Fiction Friends Gold Guy Happened Him His Just Lack Love Love Me Make Make Up Memoirs Much Obscure Particularly Passion Regular Regular Guy Ridiculous Solid Stolen Tales Telling Up Writer

Quote Author

Steven Pressfield
American - Author
Born: 1943

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

Tom Robbins

Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.This is not one of those memoirs.

Kate Madison

In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.

Darin Strauss

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.

Joe Eszterhas

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

Arthur Golden

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.

Tom Wolfe

I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.

Edwidge Danticat

The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him

Thomas Ligotti

The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction.

Gary Shteyngart

As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

Lidia Yuknavitch

Chelsea Handler is a good friend of mine, and I always was inspired by the fact that she was taking her life and turning it into these ridiculous, raunchy memoirs. She really has a talent, and she's a great writer. I was inspired by her trajectory.

Jenny Mollen

But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.

Rebecca Wells

That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.

Italo Calvino

When public figures write memoirs, there is always some indecision regarding how much they want to write of things as they were and how much they want to cut corners to avoid riling up others. I decided to write my memoirs exactly as they were, and I will not digress - not when things are ill at ease and not when they are comfortable.

Ehud Olmert

If you read history, right, if you read [Mikhail] Gorbachev's memoirs, Gorbachev memoirs said the key thing in winning the Cold War was our insistence on nuclear defense, because they knew they couldn't match us.

Rudy Giuliani

A Quote by Steven Pressfield

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors