Books Quote by Paul Auster

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

— Arthur Phillips

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

— Elizabeth Gilbert

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

— Emily Gould

A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress…

— Homer Hickam

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just…

— Gary Shteyngart

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

— Steve Bisley

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

— Carly Fiorina

For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.

— Sheila Heti

I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story,…

— Emily Susan Rapp

The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just…

— Gary Shteyngart

Writing fiction is ... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

— Rose Wilder Lane

The other reason I didn't want to fictionalize it is because one of the main points of publishing a memoir in nonfiction was that…

— Melissa Febos