Memoir Quotes

History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.

Let no family go into eternity without having left their memoirs for their children, their grandchildren, and their posterity.

I will leave no memoirs.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down.

I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

I could have written a misery memoir and instead I tried to make it funny. I never complained.

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.

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.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

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

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.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

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.

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.

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.

A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir.

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

Bush's memoir is 512 pages. To be fair, 200 of those pages are just games and puzzles.

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

Yet one new trend I do like coming from mainstream publishers right now is memoirs tied to research that explores the narrator's dilemma.

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.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

My memoirs are full of humor, I had to change jokes because it was a little too dark.

This week Sarah Palin's memoir became a bestseller. It's not even out yet. It's being translated into English.

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.

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

Much more than memoir; it's history.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

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.

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.

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.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

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.

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).

For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.