Humourous Memoir Quotes

In love, one always begins in deceiving oneself, and one always ends in deceiving others. ~ Oscar Wilde

I've grown old with this century; there's not much left of either of us. ~ Penelope Lively

I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do. Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers. ~ Buster Keaton

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs. ~ Andre Dubus III

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. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there. ~ Koren Zailckas

All writers want to a place their mark upon human consciousness by creating a physical record of their distinctive thoughts and an index of their cherished emotional memories. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph. ~ Janice Erlbaum

Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. "So that's what war looks like!" von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, "We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion. ~ Erik Larson

Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet ... When we lose stories, our understanding of the world is less rich, less true. ~ Susan J. Tweit

Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising. ~ Amy Tan

I rarely give advice - your personal growth will only make me look worse by comparison - but as a suggestion, find your most psychotic baby picture and have it on hand for those days when you want to throw in the towel. It is both joyful and effective. ~ Anna Kendrick

To me there is no shame in telling the truth, but ironically, I think shame is usually the reason people don't. ~ Tina Alexis Allen

Well, go on then, Abby; run along and let the nice man compromise you. ~ Anne Gracie

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes." ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl ~ Kimberly Kinrade

As a writer, I was deliberately creating an alternate world, and then populating it with experiences and people that I knew in this world, but I'd shake up the mix considerably. And about the same time that the memoir was becoming the dominant popular literary form in the mid to late 90s, I started reading writers who were deliberately playing with the notion of "truth" and "fiction" - that struck me as a much more interesting way to tell certain stories, particularly in the realm of comedy. ~ Kevin Keck

In my mother's book, a vegetarian is somebody who is not concern with his or her diet and health. "Someone who prefer bush and grass, as if they is sheeps and cows, is somebody who don't have enough food to put in his mouth," she always say.
Only vegetarians eat dryfood regularly - and like to eat it, too. It is not considered normal for a person to cook food that doesn't have some amount o' meat or fish to go with it. Only someone who is starving, who don't have money to buy a fish head or a single flying fish or even the head of a dolphin - in other words, a person who is "catching his arse" - has to eat dryfood. A person at this stage is a person one remove from having to cook bakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. ~ Austin Clarke

Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist - life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for. ~ NikNak

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and remind us to go all in, because life is short. The joy edges the pain and gives us a reason to rise. ~ Anna White

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I think this is the essence of life: to be willing circle back, to fall in deeper, to relearn what I thought I already knew. ~ Anna White

I wanted nothing more out of life than I did to keep my family together and make sure they were safe. The memory of those days reminds me of how exhausted I had been, but my siblings gave my life purpose, they were my bridge from pain to healing, from past to future. They are as much the authors of my survival as I am of theirs. ~ Ruth Wariner

Writing is all about tents: sometimes you're competent, sometimes you're eloquetent. ~ Kevin Focke

Welcome," she said flatly. "You are aware that the dildo iron maiden is bring your own didos?"

We held up our bag of dildos.

"And that there are no actual spikes or blades of any type allowed in the iron maiden?"

"Did somebody really try that?" Drix asked.

BellaSade nodded tiredly. She gestured to the open chamber. "As you can see, the iron maiden has steps inside so that you can impale yourself on different dildos on different levels. Any projections near the eyes or ears must be no longer that four inches and completely blunt. This is the signal hole. " She indicated a large hole in the side of the iron maiden. "If you need to safe signal use that. That--" she pointed to another large hole in the back -- "is the grope hole. Please do not signal through the grope hole or grope through the signal hole. ~ J.A. Rock

I define success as being the best, authentic me that I can be. ~ Leeky Behrman

I wore you on me at all times
Like I now carry my pen.
Unlike your own opinion my
Belongings must have a function.
You bled through the ink of my lines and
To be my subject nursed your thirst.

Was it my fault, or your own, that you forgot
- I do not deal in tender verse. ~ Mie Hansson

The two guys who ran the place, always in Williamsburg hipster uniforms of short-sleeved shirts and neatly trimmed beards that looked stuck on with spirit gum, paid, as ever, no attention to anything but the food and the money. Tallow imagined that every night they counted their money and prided themselves on having not made eye contact with anything human. ~ Warren Ellis

Sir," said the guard from behind me. "I'd appreciate it if you left your club here."
I paused and looked over my shoulder, He had a gun. His hand wasn't exactly resting on it, but he'd tucked his thumb into his belt about half an inch away.
"It isn't a club," I said calmly. "It's a walking stick."
"Six feet long."
"It's traditional Ozark folk art."
"With dents and nicks all over it."
I thought about it for a second. "I'm insecure?"
"Get a blanket. ~ Jim Butcher

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

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. We don't choose the experience but we do choose how we react to the experience we have. Choose to be positive, choose to be helpful, choose to be happy. ~ Paula Coffer

People who talk too much are tiresome, especially those who are not informative, thought-provoking, or funny. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

While you're singing something romantic, I can't get the lyrics to 'Love and Marriage' out of my head, and that tune always reminds me of the jingle from Jeopardy. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.
Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me. ~ Frances Mayes

Don't think of Diana Vreeland's memoir as a book; it's more like a lunch. A bit of souffle, a glass of champagne, some green grapes - light, bubbly and slightly tart - all served up by an egocentric but inventive hostess. ~ Cathleen McGuigan

Hollywood Rule:

RULE #1: You only need a license to do three things in the film business: blow up a building, wash someone's hair, or drive a truck. You need no license, certification, documentation, or, for that matter, any filmmaking experience to be a writer, producer, director, actor, or even a studio executive. All you need is money. ~ David Marder

I was no longer following a trail.

I was learning to follow myself. ~ Aspen Matis

Doing a geographic" is a term alcoholics often use for acting on the impulse to start over by moving to a new town, or state, instead of making any internal changes. It's the anywhere-but-here part of the disease that says, "Remove yourself from this, go someplace new, and everything will be better." Two years into our Florida stint, my mother pulled a geographic as radical as the move from Rochester. The new plan was to head for California.

She enrolled in the mathematics graduate program at the University of California's shiny new campus in San Diego, and as soon as our elementary school let out for the summer, she put us into a new Buick station wagon – a gift from her parents – and drove us across the country.

You'd think we'd have protested at yet another move. After all, having been duped before, we were in no position to believe that the next move would be any different. But I have no memory of being unhappy about the news. Because that's what often happens when an alcoholic parent is doing a geographic. She pulls you in and, before you know it, you, too, believe in the promise of the new place. ~ Katie Hafner

I don't suppose you'd want to go destroy some evil, would you? the voice said. I'm not really sure what that means, to be honest. I'll just trust you to decide. ~ Brandon Sanderson

You know you're having a bad week when you call 911, the paramedics come to your house, and one of them notices you've rearranged your furniture. ~ Cherie Kephart

The whole world is like an opened candy jar, and we're plunging in for the best treats ~ Vicki Alayne Bradley

Had Volcker never pushed through his radical change in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer. ~ Michael Lewis

Ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change ... ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It's not as if I knew answers which I am going to set down in the form of a novel or a memoir or a sermon. It's, rather, I'm going to search myself for what I might have to say in this area. ~ Frederick Buechner

We aren't afraid of what we can explain. ~ Aspen Matis

So Septimus will be the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold," said Tertius.
"There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks," pointed out Quintus. ~ Neil Gaiman

Once we have a true revelation that we are loved, valued, and purposed, it becomes difficult to live in such a way that contradicts this truth. ~ Harmony Dust

We had never eaten our own chickens but we delighted in eating their eggs. No matter how hot the summer became, they always presented us with eggs, which I thought was very generous of them, considering the heat. I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered. ~ Victoria Twead

Writing is born out of passion and desire, but it is bred, brought up, in obsession and compulsion. Feed your drive to persist. Damn your fears. Claim your writing as your own, ~ Susan Carol Hauser

Connor, if ye doona kill this fledgling, I will. The lad is begging for it.
-Angus McKay about Gregori Holstein ~ Kerrelyn Sparks