Top 100 Autobiographical Quotes
#1. I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.
Ingmar Bergman
#2. Because of the wonderfully positive response to 'Life's That Way,' I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff - maybe another book. I don't know. It doesn't help that I'm lazy.
Jim Beaver
#3. For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.
John Darnielle
#4. The film was semi-autobiographical. Director Mahesh Bhatt based it on his relationship with actress Parveen Babi.
Anupama Chopra
#5. I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.
Jamaica Kincaid
#6. Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical.
Terry McMillan
#7. Sometimes when people look at the work I've done with my family, they think it's autobiographical. But it really isn't. It's more about the idea of family.
Ari Marcopoulos
#8. I do think all art is autobiographical, and I do think I know quite a bit about women. I don't know anything about men.
Gloria Vanderbilt
#9. In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
Paul Auster
#10. People ask, 'Are your things autobiographical?,' and I think, no, they're not autobiographical directly, but of course my life has informed my work.
Andrea Arnold
#11. There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
Mark Strand
#12. All art is autobiographical. You can only create what you are.
Dale Carnegie
#13. The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
Alice Munro
#14. I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#15. Many of the comedies I had made in Sweden were slightly based on semi-autobiographical experiences, so adapting novels was a very different experience.
Lasse Hallstrom
#16. All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Paul Auster
#17. All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.
James Joyce
#18. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.
James Joyce
#19. I occasionally experience the discomfort of people assuming my work is autobiographical.
Jonathan Tropper
#20. Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?
Michelle Huneven
#21. The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
Antonio Damasio
#22. 'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state.
Paul Schrader
#23. I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.
Jason Isbell
#24. Autobiographical memory: Memory across the lifespan for both specific events and self-related information.
Alan Baddeley
#25. To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
Robertson Davies
#26. Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.
Anna Journey
#27. The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
#28. In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.
Lee Hall
#29. [I]nternalized experiences of selfhood are linked to autobiographical narratives, which are linked to biographies, legal testimonies, and medical case histories, which are linked to forms of therapy and theories of the subject. . .
Anthony Kenny
#30. All art is autobiographical - if it's not, it's not going to quicken on-stage, and it's not going to come alive.
Constantin Stanislavski
#31. I had absolutely no trauma in my childhood. If anyone ever assumed that my books were autobiographical, they'd be sorely disappointed, because none of these things happened to me.
Jodi Picoult
#32. I loathe writing autobiographical material because if it's dull no-one should have to read it anyway, and if it's interesting I should be using it for a story.
Shirley Jackson
#33. In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#34. I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.
Jim Crace
#35. A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
John Berger
#36. I read a lot of autobiographical stories, and I write plays and prose. And I play piano and cello. A lot of my downtime is devoted to that.
Alexis Dziena
#37. All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.
P.D. James
#38. Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one's self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one's gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left ...
Vera Brittain
#39. It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#40. It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
David Leavitt
#41. I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.
Billy Collins
#43. Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#44. Anyone who writes an autobiographical work at the age of 34 is, at best, presumptuous. It occurred to me that it was time to set the record straight.
Jessica Savitch
#45. I don't write non-fiction because I get bored. Some of my writing is autobiographical, but not the way readers imagine. I use my memory of settings, events and people. I weave history into my stories, but my narratives are made up.
Sefi Atta
#46. I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.
Natalie Merchant
#47. You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books ... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.
Paul Auster
#48. One function of the imagination in autobiographical writing is to allow the writer to try out different versions of the self.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
#49. Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
Gunter Grass
#50. I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.
Janet Fitch
#51. 'Illustrado' is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness ... The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too.
Miguel Syjuco
#52. Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label
to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.
John Irving
#53. The first book I ever wrote was in fourth grade and it was called 'Billy's Booger.' It was an autobiographical piece about a kid who was really bad at math.
William Joyce
#54. I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me.
James Lee Burke
#55. Each one of my films is personal; each one of my films is emotionally autobiographical. And I like directors who do that.
Jason Reitman
#56. The stories that I want to tell are completely, well, somewhat autobiographical. It's completely based on my own self-absorption issues and problems.
Nicole Holofcener
#57. But in the act of attempting to imitate I discovered that I had a voice of my own. Whether I liked it or not was another matter. I found that I was my best or that I pleased myself most or came closest to my goals when I was tapped into something autobiographical.
Guy Maddin
#58. In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.
Sam Shepard
#59. That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.
Pat Barker
#60. The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
Paul Auster
#61. All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
John Banville
#62. I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
Maya Angelou
#63. All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
Federico Fellini
#64. All of my films have been autobiographical - it's all I've got to go on.
Ira Sachs
#65. If you think of any long-term artist that makes music throughout several decades, you would hope that it's autobiographical and a form of self-expression, and that's certainly how I approach my music.
DJ Shadow
#67. I'd liked my first record, it was autobiographical and beautiful.
Lana Del Rey
#68. The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.
Patricia Hampl
#70. Of course, there were other sorts of literature
theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical
but they were just dry wanks.
Julian Barnes
#71. In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.
Molly Antopol
#72. Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?
Lauren Slater
#73. My work looks like a comic book in form, but it's not a typical comic book in content. I write autobiographical stuff.
Harvey Pekar
#74. Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.
Alison Bechdel
#75. The final four works are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.
Alice Munro
#76. 'Nil By Mouth' was a bit autobiographical, but as I always pointed out at the time, that's not my dad.
Gary Oldman
#77. I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.
P.J. Harvey
#78. Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.
Lisa Unger
#79. Recording is more autobiographical than acting. It's me - either how I'm feeling then or once felt at some point in my life. It's all me.
Janet Jackson
#80. Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical. You've got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That's how they know you're not kidding.
Bruce Springsteen
#81. Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.
Sophie Hannah
#82. Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it's purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it's going to fail.
Nick Flynn
#83. I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!
Cecily Von Ziegesar
#84. All art, from the paintings on the walls of cave dwellers to art created today, is autobiographical because it comes from the secret place in the soul where imagination resides.
Gloria Vanderbilt
#85. I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#86. Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.
Matthew McGrory
#87. I've yet to write a stand-up show that isn't autobiographical.
Mike Birbiglia
#89. What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.
Josh Radnor
#90. After 'Blankets,' I was sick of drawing myself and doing this autobiographical, mundane, Midwestern sort of comics. I wanted to create something bigger than myself and outside myself.
Craig Thompson
#91. I would like to do something autobiographical, set to music. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to try.
Phoebe Snow
#92. All my movies have an autobiographical dimension, but that is indirectly, through the personages. In fact, I am behind everything that happens and that is said, but I am never talking about myself in first person singular.
Pedro Almodovar
#93. Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).
Edmund White
#94. 'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical.
Colm Toibin
#95. You can't hide behind the guise of fiction. No matter how autobiographical a fictional scene is, you can always tell the reader - in protecting yourself - that you made it up.
Rob Roberge
#96. Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."
Jamaica Kincaid
#97. Everything you do is autobiographical. Yeah, I grew up in a town called Redding and I had older brothers and sisters so it's all my memories of growing up.
Ricky Gervais
#98. Sometimes the autobiographical link in each story is very literal, like I did work at The Texas School for the Blind, and I did once lose a mattress out of the back of a friend's truck.
Arthur Bradford
#99. She wasn't being methodological. She was being autobiographical.
Stephen L. Carter
#100. All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extension.
Raina Telgemeier
