Top 434 Memoir Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

One of the things I write about a bit in my Madam Secretary memoir is on Rwanda, where I was an instructed ambassador at the U.N., and my instructions were to not vote for increased forces there, and I didn't like my instructions. So I got up and called Washington and said, "Change my instructions," and they didn't.

'Working Class Man' is my second memoir and is a continuation of my story from where 'Working Class Boy' left off. The book is really an attempt at explaining the impact of my childhood on myself and the ones I loved as an adult.

The early reviews of Dick Cheney's memoir have not evaluated the book, but instead have used its publication as an occasion for attacks on Cheney and his record, with general assaults on George W. Bush's administration thrown in for good measure.

The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy - especially on top of the post-divorce fighting that was still going on between my parents. But this is why you don't write a memoir at age fourteen.

I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.

One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you’ve learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning." Memoir From Antproof Case

When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.

When we spoke, Gene Wilder had just written a memoir called "Kiss Me Like A Stranger." The title was suggested by his late wife Gilda Radner three weeks before she died in 1989.

Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.

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.

Defining oneself is a revolutionary act, and, as described in her memoir, Janet Mock fiercely fought to free herself with exquisite bravery and sensitivity. Redefining Realness is full of hope, dreams, and determination. It is a true American girl story.

Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.

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.

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

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

I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

Oftentimes, if a writer really gets her hooks into me, I'll want to read interviews, or listen to an interview, or read a literary biography or a memoir of some kind. And doing so almost always deepens my enjoyment of the author and her work.

There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.

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.

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 dont know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, its 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.

When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

Frank Berliners spiritual memoir is beautifully crafted and written. It is a tale about love, and the great longing that springs from there—to learn, to grow, to be real, and to forge a genuine connection with oneself and others, with life, and with death. I highly recommend it.

Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'

In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.

One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).

It was actually fun to write [memoir], because I went back to interview people my parents had taught or who had worked with them, and I learned a lot about them that I hadn't known.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

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.

The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.

What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I kept expecting that sooner or later the effort would come to seem like second nature to me, but it never did.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.

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.

George Bowering doesn’t play fair. Baseball Love is so good there is no memoir in the league that can go up against it. Bowering has a sense of story and an eye for detail that eliminate the possibility that he was a lousy second baseman. Reading a home run is fun.

If you wrote a crummy line or maybe didn't sing to the best of your ability, there's layers of 10 different instruments all working to convey something. In writing prose for the memoir, if it's not working, it's just not working. It's harder to figure out how to fix it.

Tobias Wolff is a hell of a writer, but you knew that already. His first memoir, 'This Boy's Life,' was a Huck Finn story set in the Eisenhower era - a story so rich and wounding that not even Hollywood could make a bad movie out of it.

Speaking specifically about the memoir, I know that's a criticism that people can have about my work. When I look at the young men's lives, if they're reduced to the worst thing they've done, then it's easy for them to become a stereotype. I keep running into that with newspaper articles that are very short.

I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.

Candid and searing, Deborah Jiang Stein’s memoir is a remarkable story about identity, lost and found, and about the author’s journey to reclaim—and celebrate—that most primal of relationships, the one between mother and child. I dare you to read this book without crying.

I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think about it, to articulate it, and to explore it.

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.

Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.

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.

You read so much about the healing power of memoir, but you don't read about the wounding power it has first. The recollection of past events is not, in and of itself, therapeutic.

I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.

If people call my book an actor's memoir I will be very upset. I can't bear anything too literal, so it has elements of truth and elements of fiction sitting side by side.

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.

I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.

I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does; it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.

The last book I read to my mom was 'Barbara Bush: A Memoir' published by mom in 1994. It reflected on their entire life - dad going to China, running the CIA, running for Senate, running for President twice.

To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only "real" in the space of the text.

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.'

The memoir was a very personal book. I wrote it as a personal journey and search about who my father was and how my family had come together and come apart - sorting all that out, you know, issues of personal identity.

My first book was about grappling with my identity and transitioning medically and socially as a young person. At that point, it hadn't been told yet. There wasn't a trans memoir that was written from the perspective of a young person that transitioned.

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character.