Based On A True Story A Memoir Quotes

Think about it mate – the 'Long Gun'. That's a ladyboy bar.

I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that’s why everyone does everything.

It's true what they say. Never meet your heroes. It turns out they're all a bunch of fucking assholes. They're probably the reason you turned into such a fucking asshole - because they were your heroes and you spent all your time trying to be like them.

I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is.

It was like a broken calculator... It just didn't add up.

When it's unexpected, death comes fast like a ravenous wolf and tears open your throat with a merciful fury. But when it's expected, it comes slow and patient like a snake, and the doctor tells you how far away it is and when, exactly it will be at your door. And when it will be at the foot of your bed. And when it will be on your flesh. It's all right there on the clipboards.

Before I was famous I had a whole bunch of jobs where all I needed was boots. People would look right past me, or if they did look at me, it was with a mean look. But when I got famous, people would look at me and smile and wonder where they knew me from. If they flat-out recognized me, they'd laugh and dance like they'd won a prize, and I'd just stand there and smile and feel warmth from their love. So the fame made the world, which is a real cold place, a little less cold.

I didn't like my head but I loved unskilled labor, manual labor. That kind of work let my mind alone, let it be free.

Then he unsmiled his lips and got real plural on me. “We’ll let you know.

The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you're not careful it's too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth.

Believe in yourself, your dreams, wishes, desires and goals, even if others don’t.

Education means Independence and Independence means liberty!

At the white house this week, President Clinton officially came out against same-sex marriages. What's more, the president said he's not too crazy about opposite-sex marriages, either.

If my job was to shovel, and shovel until eight hours had passed, then my body worked on its own. It had no use for my mind. So my mind would take off to a world of imagination. And that's where stand-up comedy started.

Like any published memoir, our own life stories should also come with a disclaimer: “This story that I tell about myself is only based on a true story. I am in large part a figment of my own yearning imagination.” And it’s a good thing, too. As we will see, a life story is an intensely useful fiction.

The privilege of leaning on God, and others, when I couldn’t stand strong on my own may not have been the reasons why tragedy and suffering had visited us. But these blessings would not have been experienced if tragedy and suffering had not visited us.

I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that’s why everyone does everything. But I’ve had plenty of wasted nights, after losses and bigger losses, to consider the question more seriously. So why the attraction? Most people would think it’s the wins that keep the gambler going, but any gambler knows this is not true. As you place your chips on the craps table, you feel anxiety and impatience. When the red dice hit the green felt with a thunk and you’re declared the winner and the chips are pushed toward you, you feel relief. Relief is all. And relief is fine, but hardly what a man would give the whole rest of his life to gain. It has to be something else, and the best I’ve come up with is this: It is a particular moment. A magic moment that occurs after the placing of a bet and before the result of that bet. It 1s after the red dice are thrown but before they lie still on the green felt where they fall. It is when the dice are in the air, and as long as they are there, time stops. As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.

I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that’s why everyone does everything. But I’ve had plenty of wasted nights, after losses and bigger losses, to consider the question more seriously. So why the attraction? Most people would think it’s the wins that keep the gambler going, but any gambler knows this is not true. As you place your chips on the craps table, you feel anxiety and impatience. When the red dice hit the green felt with a thunk and you’re declared the winner and the chips are pushed toward you, you feel relief. Relief is all. And relief is fine, but hardly what a man would give the whole rest of his life to gain. It has to be something else, and the best I’ve come up with is this: It is a particular moment. A magic moment that occurs after the placing of a bet and before the result of that bet. It 1s after the red dice are thrown but before they lie still on the green felt where they fall. It is when the dice are in the air, and as long as they are there, time stops. As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

Suddenly I saw a lightbulb go on over Lorne's head and his eyes brightened and I could tell he had an idea. But no such luck. It was just that Goddamned bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling and kept going off and on all day.

The plain truth is that Adam Eget is an alcoholic and that's why he doesn't drink. Me, I'm not an alcoholic and that's why I do drink.

I will say this about the young boy in the tiny white coffin. Despite the doctor's dire predictions, the boy was too tough, resolute, and courageous to let something as small as a deadly disease defeat him. No, the boy was made of stronger stuff than that and it took much more to defeat him. It took a three-ton municipal bus moving at forty miles per hour driven by one Cecil Richard Anderson to defeat this boy.

Well, the thing is, Norm, you are absolutely correct," said Lorne. "Jim is nonpareil." Then he just looked at me. A long time passed---maybe forty-five minutes---until I finally said, "All right, all right. What's that word mean?

And he was standing there, reading one of those big books. You know the kind. Usually you can't even understand their stupid titles, and when you try to read them you get one word in and get really sleepy.

People recognized Saget everywhere we went and would say, "Hey, you're Bob Saget!" and Saget would turn to them and say , "Thank you," as if it was a compliment.

I was honored that these smart, educated folk had given me the moniker. But the truth was, I was nowhere near as smart as Alfred Einstein. Shoot, I wasn't even as smart as that new scientist, the one with the wheelchair and the funny way of talking. But I wasn't gonna let the eggheads and bluestockings in the writer's room know that.

It doesn't matter how cynical I think I am. I'm always delighted to find out that things in this life still have the capacity to surprise me.

And then that big Chris laugh. Man, I miss that laugh. That big Chris laugh.