Mary Karr Quotes

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

Writing a memoir begins a process that doesn't necessarily end with publication. You begin to think about family life and stories and relationships, and those are ongoing.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.

I've always liked the idea of memoirs, going into someone else's life, going through someone else's day and getting out of your own head.

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

I have some very good friends who've written memoirs, but it's not for me. It's just not a format that I'm interested in.

If you're going to write about your life, you must write about your life.

When you write an autobiography, it has to be authentic.

I like autobiographies. I wouldn't mind making one of those.

There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in 'A Feather on the Breath of God' I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

I write about my life, choosing incidents that I think will be, for one reason or another, significant to people. Often because they may have experienced the same things.

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.