Literary Memoir Quotes

Doubt is a lot like faith; A mustard's seed worth changes everything. ~ Donna Johnson

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism. ~ Kate Zambreno

The second day of the book tour I stopped an interviewer and said, "Aren't you asking the wrong question?" The interviewer stared at me blankly.

"The question is not really why I chose to share my experiences with other people. The question we should be dealing with is why does anyone mistreat their children? I think that's what we should be talking about. ~ Christina Crawford

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.' ~ Pat Conroy

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from... ~ Kathleen Norris

Instead of an unhinged lunatic you may glimpse a punctured soul-a mere human being like you. ~ Shannon Love

Write or perish in the banality of mediocrity! ~ Thomas K. Matthews

It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21) ~ Northrop Frye

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die. ~ Voltaire

I don't know that I've gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was. ~ Jonathan Ames

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career. ~ Justin Cronin

The author is impacted by a hidden insistence that takes the shape of different combinations each time a
different text is produced but the underlying problem remains the same for him. ~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Isn't this amazing? Clinton is getting $8M for his memoir, Hillary got $8M for her memoir. That is $16M for two people who for eight years couldn't remember anything. ~ Jay Leno

PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture on von Neumann replicators to be carried as briefing material on the US Navy twain USS Brian Cowley. ~ Terry Pratchett

Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author. ~ United Nations

Willow trees, willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind
me of nothing ~ Frank O'Hara

Talking of appearances, I would like my future readers to know that the picture of Jim and me that Thomas Hart Benton painted on the wall of the Missouri state capitol bears not the slightest resemblance to either one of us. ... I've never been satisfied with any representation of myself and have seen only one picture of Jim that did him justice. I don't know why this should be, unless it is evidence of a nearly universal prejudice against us, instigated by Sunday school superintendents, Republicans, and bigots. ~ Norman Lock

Since I was a girl I always felt as if I would like to write stories. I never had that ambition or shine to make a name; first place because I knew what time and labor it meant to acquire a literary style. Second place, because whenever I wanted to write a story I never could think of a plot. ~ Kate Chopin

ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won numerous prizes both in the United States and overseas, including four O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Raised in Cleveland, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. ~ Anthony Doerr

In the literary machine that Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over. ~ Gilles Deleuze

I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life. ~ Richard Hell

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever. ~ Pico Iyer

The power of sacred music increases the honor given to God by the Church in union with Christ, its Head. Sacred music likewise helps to increase the fruits which the faithful, moved by the sacred harmonies, derive from the holy liturgy. These fruits, as daily experience and many ancient and modern literary sources show, manifest themselves in a life and conduct worthy of a Christian. ~ Pope Pius XII

Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

He's writing his name in water," I said. "What's that?" It was the half-regretful term - borrowed from the headstone of John Keats - that Crabtree used to describe his own and others' failure to express a literary gift through any actual writing on paper. Some of them, he said, just told lies; others wove plots out of the gnarls and elf knots of their lives and then followed them through to resolution. That had always been Crabtree's chosen genre - thinking his way into an attractive disaster and then attempting to talk his way out, leaving no record and nothing to show for his efforts but a reckless reputation and a small dossier in the files of the Berkeley and New York City police departments. ~ Michael Chabon

I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another "useful fiction," and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I'm saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close. ~ Philip Roth

But our eyes know to find each other and they do. And it reminds me of the way the ocean breaks: Blue turning blue again. Blue meeting land. Collapsing there, deeply. It reminds me of nothing else. And that means we are safe. ~ Meg Flores

The word "canon" is derived from a Hebrew word signifying "reed" (qaneh) and by extension "measuring stick." It enters into the Greek language as "canon" (kanon) with a wider semantic range signifying exemplary standards in relation to literary works, grammatical rules, and even certain human beings. The word was coined in the early church to indicate an absolutely authoritative, complete list of God-inspired books, which was the standard of truth (Athanasius, 39th Festal Letter). Although such a list was considered closed, it is clear that the creation of the canon did not happen in an instant. It had a long and complex history before such closure occurred. The historian Josephus (AD 95) describes a closed list of inspired books that had been authoritative for all Jews for centuries (Against Apion 8). ~ J. Daniel Hays

All use of speech implies convention and therefore at least duality of minds. The problem of communication through language may in this light be seen as the search for the means supplied by the conventions (or code) to transmit a message from one mind to another. (This definition is as applicable to "literary" communication as it is to "non-literary.") ...Is the code exactly the same for transmitter and receiver? Indeed, can it ever be? It hardly seems likely, since in the strict sense no two people have ever acquired exactly the same code. Consequently, the correspondence between the writer's understand of his writing (I do not, of course, mean merely a conscious or reflective understanding) and the reader's understanding of it will be at least approximate. Another variable is the mental, emotional, and cultural constitution of the being who used the code to transmit a message, and of the being who decodes it. To what extent are they capable of understanding each other? To what extent will they be willing to cooperate in dealing with the inevitable problems in communication? To what extent will anticipated or actual reaction ("feedback") from the receiver affect the framing of the message? Perhaps more important than any of these variables, there is the as yet unresolved question of the very nature of language, and therefore of communication through language. What do agreed upon symbols stand for? Is it conceivable that they correspond to something objectively identifiable? ~ Robert Ellrich

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think - the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn't known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie's rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn't a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being - whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars. ~ Annie Dillard

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants. ~ Matthew Pearl

Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I'm just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style. ~ Michael Dirda

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars! ~ Michael Flynn

Compare, for example, seventeenth century writers with those of the eighteenth. What a difference in tone and gait! The former, under a veneer of servility, have the most noble and proud stance… They do not pretend to reign. They merely stand at their place, recognize the place of a superior power beyond, give themselves completely to their writing task, dismiss the temptation of advertising and demonstrate their professional dedication. On the other hand, look at the Voltaire, Diderot and the like: they open well the era of intellectuals, writing stooges as they are, courtiers of princes they flatter and despise at the same time - something they are forced to do as they want to usurp their power… Their courtier nature reveals in everything they do… The whole eighteenth century, both spiritual and plain on a scoundrel background, is libertine, and already pornographic: such is the start of literary mercantilism; people of letters make money out of their writings, pretend to financial independence, and they write garbage to flatter the opinion of their public. ~ Edouard Berth

Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error. ~ Maurice Blanchot