1.
History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.
Carol Tavris
2.
Let no family go into eternity without having left their memoirs for their children, their grandchildren, and their posterity.
Spencer W. Kimball
4.
Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
Mary Karr
5.
For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.
Akhil Sharma
6.
I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.
Kate Zambreno
7.
I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down.
Karl Lagerfeld
8.
I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
Mitch Albom
9.
The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
Clive James
10.
I could have written a misery memoir and instead I tried to make it funny. I never complained.
Caitlin Moran
11.
Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.
Jeannette Walls
12.
The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.
Donald Miller
14.
I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.
Sally Ride
16.
I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
17.
When Goldie Hawn wrote her memoirs, no one said Goldie Hawn was snitching. When Jane Fonda wrote her memoirs, no one said Jane Fonda was snitching.
Karrine Steffans
18.
I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.
Brett Davern
19.
I don't like talking about myself; I like to let the music be the spokesperson for me. So doing a memoir and all that chronological 'and then this happened and then blah blah' doesn't appeal to me that much. I think there's more mystique in what you don't know about.
Russell Mael
20.
I'm writing a memoir. I'm four pages in. I start with my first memory, which is kicking my uncle in the balls. I was four.
Michael Showalter
21.
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).
Lidia Yuknavitch
22.
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
Elie Wiesel
23.
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
24.
For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.
Alexei Sayle
25.
Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.
Cheryl Strayed
26.
Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.
Carly Fiorina
27.
But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.
Rebecca Wells
28.
The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
29.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
Arthur Golden
30.
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
31.
Book Everything is Flammable is an odd format though, not quite a diary and not quite a memoir. I was working on it as it was happening. This was gratifying to me.
Gabrielle Bell
32.
I'm making a kind of a memoir of certain aspects and times in my life. Now that I'm older I can look back and analyze some things, and see the root of things.
Lourdes Portillo
33.
A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir.
Tony Blankley
34.
No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.
Arthur Golden
35.
Bush's memoir is 512 pages. To be fair, 200 of those pages are just games and puzzles.
Craig Ferguson
36.
Yet one new trend I do like coming from mainstream publishers right now is memoirs tied to research that explores the narrator's dilemma.
Debra Monroe
37.
I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.
Rosemary Mahoney
38.
I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.
John Major
39.
I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.
Paul Auster
41.
My memoirs are full of humor, I had to change jokes because it was a little too dark.
Marina Abramovic
42.
This week Sarah Palin's memoir became a bestseller. It's not even out yet. It's being translated into English.
Bill Maher
43.
Of all the many memoirs by former Soviet officials, Palazchenko's is among the best written and also the most objective. Even his descriptions of U.S. policy are more accurate and judicious than those of some American scholars.
Jack F. Matlock, Jr.