Wendi McLendon-Covey Quotes

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.

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?

everybody has a story to tell

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

I do like playing the darker side of life but as much as the lighter side as well. They all resonate out of the same place, which is that everyone has a story to tell. Depending on their upbringing and their history, it determines who they are as an adult. My job is to take the role from there.

People always seem to see echoes of their own lives in my films.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

I just wanted to compile these stories about growing up with my father and I wanted people to be able to enjoy them individually, but also the entire book as a whole.

I told my whole life story in my book.

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

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

Like Rodgers and Hammerstein, I'm not afraid to deal with themes about the ups and downs of life, yet which are still entertaining, and you still feel these stories.

My memoir is a story of family and childhood, and everyone has had one of those. Mine is not the definitive version of childhood, but it's a great way to start a conversation.

This is one of the reasons I'm so interested in stories. Because everyone has a story in their life, and when their story doesn't make sense, that's when we get depressed, I think.

When I write songs, I write from a lot of perspectives.

You write an autobiography because you want to tell people how you felt about a certain matter at that time.

Most memoir writers will tell you that the hardest part of writing a memoir isn't what to include, but what to leave out.

I suppose I reached the limit of what I could do with nonfiction books, perhaps because they never felt quite intense enough - it's a journalistic enterprise, ultimately, even if you are using the memoir as a form.

There's nothing better than a personal story.

I like to talk about my life.

I've never had any interest in retelling stories from my youth.

The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

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.