Nancy Horan Quotes

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

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.

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

I think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

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.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.

American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.

It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory.

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

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself.

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

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.