“People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.” PeopleThinkingWantWritingBelieveDifficultFictionImagineEasierMemoirNovelistsImaginaryImagine ThatImaginary Life Author:Mark Leyner
“The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction.” IfsFictionHellProtectIntenseMemoirProtect Yourself Author:Gary Shteyngart
“We all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That's a kind of personal story of mine that I don't think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.” ThinkingHeartKindI CanStoriesInterestingFictionMinesBrokenGoes OnEndureWorthyLove StoryMemoirDestroyedInteresting ThingsPersonal Stories Author:Elizabeth Gilbert
“I love memoirs, particularly obscure ones because the writer is usually a regular guy just telling what happened to him and to his friends. What these tales lack in artfulness they make up for in passion and authenticity. For a writer of fiction, they are solid gold. I have stolen so much from memoirs it's ridiculous.” GuyPassionFictionHappenedGoldRidiculousTalesMemoirAuthenticityObscureStolen Author:Steven Pressfield
“In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.” WritingTryingLife IsLyingEffortFictionMemoirDelusionJustifyEpic Author:Sherman Alexie
“There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.” PeopleWritingInterestingFictionNovelSceneOrdinaryMemoir Author:Augusten Burroughs
“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.” KnowsWantFeelsWritingStoriesFictionModelsTreatsMemoirNarrativeAgendasStoryteller Author:Vivian Gornick
“The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.” EndsDesireFictionMemoirModernismNarration Author:Vivian Gornick
“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.” PeopleGivingYearsBookUseSeemsAbleRememberThreeFictionFiveImpossibleSceneTenConversationPagesMemoirDialogueFive YearsConventionsAstonishingFive Year Olds Author:Paul Auster
“Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.” FictionAimMarketingMeaningfulMemoirDistinctionCategoriesDeceiving Author:Emily Gould
“Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.” IfsWellsTwoMomentsMovingFeltFictionNovelWrittenSmartPainfulMemoirAgentsFantasticThings To DoNot SureMiningPainful Moments Author:Janice Erlbaum
“Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.” ThinkingWritingTryingYearsIdeasWantedBehindsFictionEffectsExampleYears AgoWinterVariousMemoirInterviewsProseVolumeJournalAutobiographyEssaysFragmentsNon FictionLiterary WorksWriting Essays Author:Paul Auster
“There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.” IfsWritingLittlesStoriesWould BeDifferencesFictionBoysNovelDogKillingMonstersMemoirMy DogEricDoing Me Author:Paul Auster
“As a publisher and author, I'm a big fan of historical fiction and also memoir.” BigsFictionFansHistoricalMemoirHistorical FictionPublishers Author:Andrea Davis Pinkney
“Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.” ArtReasonFormWaterFictionIssuesStylePaintingElementsStrategyStructureMemoirCraftsNonfictionCompositionFormalPreciseCritiqueChronology Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.” PersonsDoeSometimesFormBitsFictionMemoirIntimateDistinction Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“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.” PeopleWorldWayStoriesFormCertainReadingInterestingFictionComedyThis WorldBecomingLateCreatingNotionMemoirRealmsShakesDominantInteresting Ways Author:Kevin Keck
“You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.” WritingFictionMemoirWriting Fiction Author:Elizabeth Gilbert