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Tag Name "Memoir" (222)

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Memoir is a weird genre for a reporter. You end up investigating your own memories, reporting out your past.
William Finnegan
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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Memoirs have at their heart a content that happened to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.
Paul Auster
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Memoirs need confusion. It's the thing every human has in common. We are magnificently confused.
Joshua Mohr
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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.
William Zinsser
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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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Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
Mary Karr
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Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.
Jeanette Winterson
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Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.
Joshua Mohr
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Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I never felt inspired to write this book [ I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?], like I did with the cat or dog book I felt compelled. At the time (May 1999), I was planning to write and illustrate an altogether different memoir, a book about my decision whether or not to have a baby.
Suzy Becker
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[John Carlos] has spent much of his life since that time as a dedicated human rights advocate and public speaker, and he is out now with a wonderful new text a memoir, in fact.
Tavis Smiley
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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.
Terry Gross
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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.
Tim O'Brien
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People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
Tom Robbins
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I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
Rachel Cusk
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I don't write fiction but I do write narrative I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.
Vivian Gornick
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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.
Richard Ford
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I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.
Vivian Gornick
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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
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When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs.
Will Rogers
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The man is always the last to know when Cupid has struck him -Anonymous, Memoirs of a Mistress
Sabrina Jeffries
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I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
Sandra Cisneros
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