“People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.” PeopleThinkingCan DoCasesNovelHappenedCircumstancesMemoirReverseBiographies Book:Hearing Secret Harmonies: Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time Source: Hearing Secret Harmonies: Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time
“Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen.” PeopleIfsHeartBigsHappensKidsImaginationSpaceBreakNovelCreativeNiceWrittenOceanComfortableWake UpWarmMemoirRadicalStaringWhat IfSwimmingPoolPerfectionismThighsBreak Your HeartJuicyCreative LifeSillinessPleasing PeopleStaring Into Space Author:Anne Lamott
“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 know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.” IfsKnowsFirstsOrderNovelProduceMemoirLiterary Works Author:Vivian Gornick
“When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.” WritingFirstsNovelMovementProductsLateFeministMemoirQueensSixtyExesUrgentUrgencyPromProm Queen Author:Alix Kates Shulman
“I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.” ThinkingI CanRememberDealsNovelConversationMemoirRepeats Author:Paul Auster
“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.” WritingTryingHandsNextNovelPiecesWeekYouthOne DayMemoirEvolveSatNonfiction Author:Tim O'Brien
“Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.” MayPersonsActionPastNovelVirtueWrittenFinishedMemoirConclusionPublishersManuscriptsRetrospective Author:Nuala O'Faolain
“Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.” WayWritingMomentsNovelMemoirReliefBorrowedNovel Writing Author:Rick Moody
“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
“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
“We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.” WorldLooksStoriesNovelIraqMemoirShort Story Author:Elliott Colla
“When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.” ThinkingShouldWritingSaidNovelCollegeSmartMemoirProseProfessorsNonfictionGazingVery SmartNavelNavel Gazing Author:Melissa Febos
“The contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it's a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone.” ImportantCertainConsciousnessRolesNovelGoneDevelopmentMemoirContemporaryAmerican Society Author:Marco Roth
“Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.” PeopleWritingBookUsedNovelBe GoodMemoirGenreComing OutExecution Author:Marco Roth
“The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.” GivenNovelCriticismHarderMemoirNonfictionMainstream Author:Kate Zambreno
“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.” IfsMightFormAnswersNovelAreasMemoirSermons Author:Frederick Buechner