#memoirs

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#contrarianism #dissent #dissidents #free-thought #harold-rosenberg

Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction. ↗

— Frank Harris

#form #memoirs #well-known

I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have. ↗

— David Mamet

#backstage #doctors #everybody #find #go

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs. ↗

— Manuel Puig

#after #days #directing #fantasy #i

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#imagination #lack #make #memoirs #people

I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book. ↗

— Gloria Swanson

#book #divorce #far #given #i

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time. ↗

— John Major

#i #long #long time #memoirs #time

Brighton Beach does not look, smell, or sound like Russia. It's a parody of Russia at best, something as different from the real thing as a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Yes, they sell Russian food on Brighton Beach, and Russian books and videos, and Russian clothes, and there are Russian restaurants and Russian nightclubs, and everybody speaks Russian, but the Russianness of the place is so concentrated that it feels ridiculously exaggerated. Everything Russian on Brighton Beach is too Russian, far more Russian than in real Russia. This is what happens all over Brooklyn. From the Scandinavians of Bay Ridge to the Chinese of Sunset Park, Brooklyn's immigrants go to ridiculous extremes to re-create their homelands only to end up with a vulgar pastiche. ↗

— Lara Vapnyar

#brooklyn-was-mine #essays #memoirs #food

Conformity is deformity ↗

— Sharon Desruisseaux

#cleopatra #egypt #historical #historical-fiction #isis

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd. ↗

— Erik Larson

#diary #forth #found #histories #i