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

When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about plain, normal, everyday girls.

To me, having the courage to tell your own story goes hand in hand with having the curiosity and humility to listen to others' stories.

Books about technology start-ups have a pattern. First, there's the grand vision of the founders, then the heroic journey of producing new worlds from all-night coding and caffeine abuse, and finally, the grand finale: immense wealth and secular sainthood. Let's call it the Jobs Narrative.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

I had hoped when my life was chronicled, it would be an inspirational story.

Some memories are unforgettable, remaining ever vivid and heartwarming!

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that's the failure of the listener, or the journalist who retells it badly.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.

Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright's pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

Some memories are unforgettable, remaining ever vivid and heartwarming!

I seldom read anything that is not of a factual nature because I want to invest my time wisely in the things that will improve my life. Don't misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with reading purely for the joy of it. Novels have their place, but biographies of famous men and women contain information that can change lives.

Stories come to me in mysterious ways, more like dreams than reasoned creations.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

In my career as a writer, I preferred to avoid current events: I wrote young adult novels and book reviews and lifestyle journalism about health and parenting and other such evergreens.

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

Despite the natural belittling of one's self, the doubts, the insecurities, we have to wake up to the realisation that we all write our own autobiography, we are the authors of our life story. Realising that, write a good story with your life and make sure to write yourself as the protagonist. Be the hero of your journey.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

Stories are amazing and powerful because they can resonate with people depending on their needs and experiences and speak truths we need to hear in that moment in time.

When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.