Elie Wiesel Quotes

The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.

I hope in my book [My Beloved World], that the sense that I really feel connected comes through.

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

I had written a book called "Boston Boy" some years ago, and that took me from the time I could speak, I guess, in Boston through the time when I finally left to come to New York. That book had a number of sort of rites of passage for me.

It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.

Besides the drugs and counterculture, I started talking about myself, which is the first thing you do when you are a writer.

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

An autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.

The authors who affect contempt for a name in the world put their names to the books which they invite the world to read.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

With the story of your life, you dont get to write the whole book, just your character.

As a blogger, Chez Pazienza is filled with outrage, passion and insight -- delivered with a distinctive point of view, a wicked sense of humor, and a two-fisted style of prose. In Dead Star Twilight, he turns all these on himself -- and produces a fierce, funny, disturbing, but ultimately uplifting memoir. This is the book A Million Little Pieces dreamed of being.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

When I choose the title [for my book], which was my favorite title, I felt sure there was going to be a dozen books maybe with that name already because it's so obvious to me that that's the message. I was surprised it hasn't been the title of a single book. Well, there is a Shel Silverstein children's book called Falling Upwards. But no one has chosen Falling Upward as a title and I'm very happy it's right on the cover.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

If your life were a book, and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?

It was in the mid-70's, '74 or '75 I started doing leadership conferences for pastors and in '79 I wrote my first book "Think On These Things".

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.

Somebody said, "Well, you're going to write your definitive book about your life, biography." No, I'm not. I haven't done that. I wrote a book of letters which gives an insight into the real me as opposed to the public perceptions of me. But I'm convinced historians will figure out the things we got wrong and hopefully the things we got right.

Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.

The world exists to end up in a book.

In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.