Cheryl Strayed Quotes

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

It’s terribly important to write your own history before the historians get a crack at it.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

All autobiography is fiction.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.

Fiction isn't memoir and memoir isn't fiction.

It's a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

By calling it a memoir, I meant is as a collection of memories. I thought it was (a more) artful (title) than documentary.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

The truth isn't all things to all people all of the time.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

All of my stories are 95 percent truthful.

I've learned to write the truth. But to do that, I had to figure out what the truth was-and I had to realize that the truth isn't always the same for everyone. I had to realize that my truth may not be the same as your truth.

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.