Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.
Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
My memoir is about my time in film and the decision to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.
I was told that my best-case scenario would likely consist of writing my memoir and then disappearing.
For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.
I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.
The idea of a memoir is to tell the truth. I know that often the truth hurts, but a lie hurts even more.
I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.
I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary.
This week Sarah Palin's memoir became a bestseller. It's not even out yet. It's being translated into English.
I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.
One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.
Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.
The term 'celebrity memoir' has gotten such a bad name now, but there used to be a little bit of an art form to it.
Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.
Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.
With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.
A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.
Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.
'Something Borrowed' was initially titled 'Rolling the Dice,' but my editor said it sounded like a men's gambling memoir.
Cheney's memoir is not about 9/11, or solely about Bush's administration, but about his entire life and political career.
Most memoir writers will tell you that the hardest part of writing a memoir isn't what to include, but what to leave out.
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.
When you write a memoir, and it's your life, and you're exposing things that are close to home, it's hard to see it changed.
Technically a memoir, 'The Woman Warrior' becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.
For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.
Let no family go into eternity without having left their memoirs for their children, their grandchildren, and their posterity.
Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.
Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you're still alive does feel a bit posthumous.
Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.
When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
Yet one new trend I do like coming from mainstream publishers right now is memoirs tied to research that explores the narrator's dilemma.
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.
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.
A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what separates a life story that can influence other people.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.
Tony Blair is an extremely popular figure in North America. His memoir is refreshing, both for its candour and vivid portrayal of political life.
It might surprise people to know that the person who convinced me to write the third memoir - 'The Hardcore Diaries' - was actually Vince McMahon.
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 know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia.
When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.
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.
'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.
All my journalism, all my books are first person, and it's all memoir. Even when I'm writing about the oil spill in the Gulf, it's all first person there.