Celebrity Memoir Quotes

I think that the celebrity memoir as a genre is looked upon as a lesser form. One of my missions as a ghostwriter has been to elevate that form. Maybe that sounds pretentious! ~ Hilary Liftin

I think when life gets heavy, people look for an escape. "The Love Boat" is an escape. We have happy endings. You don't see many of those around. I think it gave people a vicarious adventure. ~ Gavin MacLeod

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. ~ Rob Lowe

Sometimes you don't get a second chance. You need to take a chance when you have the opportunity. Always. ~ Gavin MacLeod

The celebrity-making machine-photographers, paparazzi, press and stuff like that-can be ruthless. ~ Catherine Keener

I was known before I was born and my name will be blazoned in history long after I'm dust in the ground. Infamy is temporary, celebrity is fleeting, but royalty…royalty is forever. ~ Emma Chase

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

I don't enjoy being a celebrity, I don't want any part of that or any part of that fame for fame ... i'd actually rather die than be a celebrity slime!!! ~ Marc Almond

I think of the friendships I've strained, the generosity I've exploited, the bridges I've torched. Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; with them, forgive yourself. There may be hope for me yet. ~ Anthony Ervin

One U.S. hit single and a hit T Shirt in 1985 does not a celebrity make. ~ Holly Johnson

Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism? ~ Charles Clover

In Parton's telling, the Village is "a permanent D.C. ruling class who has managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth."17 It's not just the activist base of the left and the right who have recognized the widespread elite failure; more and more individual elites have broken ranks to acknowledge their own responsibility. ~ Christopher L. Hayes

I wondered if he thought this was a real emergency or another dramatic thing - I am constantly in some panic or despair, it seems. I worried more than I could breathe.

Mailhot, Terese Marie. Heart Berries: A Memoir (p. 106). Counterpoint. Kindle Edition. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

Celebrity has some amazing advantages, of course it does. You're given an extraordinary power. It's a door-opener. I might not have to queue for things. ~ Geri Halliwell

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy. ~ Darin Strauss

It's really hard when a celebrity dies out of nowhere, 'cause it's very shocking ... surreal. ~ Ashley Tisdale

Suddenly, [Cecilia Washburn] was getting a lot of attention from her friends," Pabst explained to the jury. "Attention from the dean of the pharmacy school ... .Attention by Dean Charles Couture, the then dean of students; by the Crime Victim Advocate office; by the nurse, [Claire] Francoeur ... .Miss Washburn got attention by the investigator and by the prosecutor. Her regret was replaced by sympathy, attention, and support, and a little bit of drama, and a little bit of celebrity ... .Her regret, fueled by drama, became purpose. She received a new public - and important - identity: victim. ~ Jon Krakauer

Celebrity culture, it's everywhere, isn't it? It's reality TV, Big Brother. I didn't become a footballer to be famous, I became a footballer to be successful. I didn't want to be famous. Now people want to be famous. Why? Why would you want people following you about all day? ~ Ryan Giggs

If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives–yours and hers. It's constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I needed. We couldn't haven known what splitting would mean. Time speeds past fast, scattering like shrapnel, and is quiet as cobwebs. We wait for the ambush. Sister will find out first; she'll be my living memory. She will be the body left standing. ~ Christa Parravani

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project. ~ Alison Bechdel

The amount of work you need to do to become a very successful celebrity is something I'm not prepared to do. ~ Rupert Graves

I always imagined rape as this violent scene of a woman walking alone down a dark alley and getting mugged and beaten by some masked criminal. Rape was an angry man forcing himself inside a damsel in distress. I would not carry the trauma of a cliché rape victim. I would not shriek in the midst of my slumber with night terrors. I would not tremble at the sight of every dark haired man or the mention of Number 1's name. I would not even harbor ill will towards him. My damage was like a cigarette addiction- subtle, seemingly innocent, but everlasting and inevitably detrimental.
Number 1 never opened his screen door to furious crowds waving torches and baseball bats. Nobody punched him out in my honor. The Nightfall crowd never socially ostracized him. Even the ex-boyfriend who'd second handedly fused the entire fiasco continued to mingle with him in drug circles. Everybody continued with business as usual. And when I told my parents I lost my virginity against my will, unconscious on a bathroom floor, Carl did not erupt in fury and demand I give him all I knew about his whereabouts so he could greet him with a rifle. Mom blankly shrugged and mumbled, "Oh, that's too bad," and drifted into the kitchen as if I'd received a stubbed toe rather than a shredded hymen.
Everyone in my life took my rape as lightly as a brief thunderstorm that might have been frightening when it happened, but was easy to forget about. I adopted that mentality as the foundation of my sex life ~ Maggie Georgiana Young

Where are you from? New York?"
"Weird you picked up on that," she said, "I've been gone from there for so long."
Like a couple of decades could dilute that accent. ~ Cathie Beck

Celebrity gives us delusion of self importance. ~ Al Goldstein

PLASTIC ANIMALS


The modern day idols and animal gods
Embrace higher platforms in the sky
Than the statues of the gods of the ancients.
They beam through our screens
And we scream for them to be seen
And we cry if they aren't covering the pages.
We care more about a celebrity
Than the man who saved
An island of a million drowning men!
Eliminate these plastic idols and bloated gods
That represent nothing but shame.
And shame on us for allowing them to be seen
In a divine manner.
No man is to ever be put on a pedestal,
If he/she is not a prime example of the right way,
Has nothing to say,
Or simply has the money to buy
A rotating banner. ~ Suzy Kassem

For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships ... Other islands fade as I brood upon them. ~ Chuma Nwokolo

It is certain that every class is interested in [educational] establishments which give to the human mind its highest improvements, and to every Country its truest and most durable celebrity. ~ James Madison

I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea ...
But, with whatever hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is - read them again - at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquid's tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir.
Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion. ~ Samuel R. Delany

If you are listening to the roar, you're going to miss the whisper. ~ Tracy Pinkerton

I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much. ~ Marya Hornbacher

And of course that was an Amaryllis that was never going to exist, one that I could never talk to or thank. I longed for her, even though I only knew her through her words. ~ Alexander Wales

It is important to measure ourselves at least once in life, undertake a personal odyssey that constructs a clarifying prism of our being. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I love to be able to do something positive with what celebrity I have. I like to be able to make it about something bigger than me; if I can help in some way, I'm happy to do that. ~ Kimberly Williams-Paisley

I'm always looking for evidence to support my conjecture that celebrity in Hollywood is sort of like a Joel Peter Witkin photograph: It looks like a big lush banquet table filled with abundance and cornucopias, and then if you look at it closer you see that all the fruit is made of wax and that entree in the middle of the table is actually a dead baby. ~ Cintra Wilson

I had never considered what it would be like to be in love until I was in it. ~ Tegan Quin

It was as if hell itself had taken human form and come up from the abyss. ~ Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir Of A Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016

What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century ~ Max Beerbohm

If I have been given any gift in this life, it's my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination. ~ Tom Robbins

I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love. ~ Aspen Matis

I try to keep my integrity. I don't want to be in 'Hello!' or on 'Celebrity Big Brother.' ~ Aidan Gillen

I remember the first time I went to Europe, I had someone take a picture of me there, so I could really see myself there. There's a sense of being outside yourself, and I think celebrity allows us that too, to be outside ourselves. ~ Jess Walter

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction. ~ Junot Diaz

The reality is that most celebrity defendants are extremely unknowledgeable, naive, and vulnerable, and if they get into trouble, they usually call their lawyer friends who handle criminal cases, and if they don't know any, they call their business lawyers, who then refer them to lawyer friends of theirs. ~ Vincent Bugliosi

A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy. ~ Isabel Allende

When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism. ~ Jesmyn Ward