Randall Park Quotes

I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.

A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy.

I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.

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

I think it's difficult, if you're a quite private person like I am, to write about your life very intimately.

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

Really, as a writer, I believe that if you're going to write about your own life, you need to do it as honestly and candidly as you are capable.

By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.

When writing 'Behind the Mask,' I opened up on every level. Hopefully, even the more knowledgeable fans, who really know me, will be surprised when they read it.

As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.

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.

The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

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.

The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.

Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we're dealing with. And to an extent, they're right. They know something about me.

When you're writing personal stories, you have to be totally uncompromising - to the extent that you can be - about yourself. I know that if I am uber-uncompromising with myself, that gives me some latitude to write about others.

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

When Goldie Hawn wrote her memoirs, no one said Goldie Hawn was snitching. When Jane Fonda wrote her memoirs, no one said Jane Fonda was snitching.

They lyrical content has grown more introspective and less abstract. I don't know if that's good or bad... Sometimes it feels a little raw to be putting so much of myself out there.

The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer.

Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason.

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

I want an autobiography without revealing any personal information.

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.