Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

I'm not sure you can count as history, was Keith Richards's "Life," which he so modestly titled it. I did find it a fascinating book. Keith's a pretty honest fellow.

I didn't read The Haunting of Hill House until sometime early in the 1990's.

One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'

This is the best biography by me I have ever read.

Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.

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

Nobody's life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.

Former president George W. Bush released his new memoir. By the way, 'memoir' is just a fancy word for 'a bunch of stuff that happened to me.

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.

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.

Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date

DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!

There's a lot of stuff that happened to me when I was kinda young. Like when I was just 12, or 13 or so. It might really shock some people. It's an interesting part of my life, I hope it's in the book, I didn't check whether they put it in or not.

This book, "Speaking Freely," starts when I came to New York. And the first chapter is about a man who became a friend of mine, much to our mutual surprise, Malcolm X.

You can't really give away anything in your book ... should be exciting, it's my life, and I'm a cool and exciting guy.

…my life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me . . .” "I’ve never much cared for horror stories.

Evan Handler's new book is simply wonderful. He pulls you inside his life, and you come out his very close friend.

I'll pay you a million dollars if you tell your life story for true.

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

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

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

Much more than memoir; it's history.

My name is Daniel, and this is the first volume of my life story, which, hopefully, will be a very long and distinguished one. Who should you read it? Very good question. Maybe because this is your planet, and you have a right to know what's actually happening on it.

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else.