Memoir Quotes
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When I say my work is travel, that's what I'm doing. And part of being biracial and multicultural is I'm always playing with genre and genre expectations. So even if I say I'm doing straight memoir, you'll see that I'm doing weird stuff with the structure. I've got images, I've got lyrics, and I've got journalism. I really try to not get stuck in genre expectations.
Faith Adiele
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I have been presented with roles with demand not just a physical ability but mental disciplines as well. 'Memoirs of a Geisha' was not so much about physical exertion...it was much more graceful and contained than that.
Tan Sri Dato' Seri Michelle Yeoh Choo-Kheng
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Many things embarrass me, but reading isnt one of them. Im not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.
Tom Rachman
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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.
Evan Osnos
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Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.
Emily Gould
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A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.
Thomas Sowell
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Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.
Nuala O'Faolain
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Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail.
Nick Flynn
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A remarkable memoir that's packed with anecdotes, advice and humor, all while maintaining a high level of dignity and self-awareness.
Steve Martin
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There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.
Nick Flynn
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I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.
Steve Martin
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Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
Steve Bisley
