Quotes About Autobiographies

#1. I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc.

George Seaton

#2. Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.

Gelett Burgess

#3. What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great.

Miles Franklin

#4. The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

Harold Acton

#5. Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.

Marilyn Ferguson

#6. In moments of exhaustion, I think for some reason of writing an autobiography
proper work for tired artists
but every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life. Maybe, incidentally, this accounts for the paucity of women's autobiographies
they know better.

Arthur Miller

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

John Ruskin

#8. I'm always embarrassed by those rugby player autobiographies which get written by journalists.

Peter Jackson

#9. Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction .

A.S. Byatt

#10. Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself.

Paul Stanley

#11. There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

John Dos Passos

#12. Aren't autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don't we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.

Frederick Weisel

#13. I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

Brett Davern

#14. He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood.

Clive Barker

#15. Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#16. Sometimes, with autobiographies, it turns into a bit of score-settling. And looking back, I don't feel the way I did then, and you kind of grow up and let it go behind you.

Marc Almond

#17. All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.

George Bernard Shaw

#18. Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.

Roberto Bolano

#19. One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely.

Lev Shestov

#20. Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.

Ellery Sedgwick

#21. I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one!

Anita Pallenberg

#22. I haven't read any of the autobiographies about me.

Elizabeth Taylor

#23. I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.

Eddie Trunk

#24. I don't want to know about my biggest idols. I don't want to read their autobiographies, I don't want to find out what they're really like.

Meg White

#25. Books seem the most potent source: each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I'm hoovering up lives at a ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person by sundown.

Caitlin Moran

#26. Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies.

Elia Kazan

#27. I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

John Cleese

#28. All autobiographies are alibi-ographies.

Clare Boothe Luce

#29. I trained as a librarian, and I run a bookstore. Fucking right I can use a gun ... if I have to engage somebody between the counter and the door, only the political autobiographies are in danger and who gives a fuck about those?

Jonathan L. Howard

#30. Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.

Paul Theroux

#31. The Internet is dumb. The Internet, with all its access to brain research, anthropology journals, social studies networks, and biographies and autobiographies, can't begin to map the complexity of our lives, or how we each affect others.

Dee Williams

#32. Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

Steven Pinker

#33. I watched a lot of drunk players, too, I learned from the autobiographies published after they had retired.

Nick Hornby

#34. I love books and the latest autobiographies. I'm a Gemini and love being with people, but then again, I love my own company, which is when I read most.

Cilla Black

#35. I think books, novels and autobiographies have a power to touch people far more personally than films do, so there's a bit more of a responsibility when you then dramatise it.

Robert Sheehan

#36. I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life.

Ranbir Kapoor

#37. I believe artists should be able to step into other people's situations, contexts and cultures and work from there. If artists don't have that freedom, then, as someone has said, are we all writing our autobiographies?

Uwem Akpan

#38. I read the book [My Life by Bill Clinton] completely. And I think it compares very favorably with Ulysses S. Grant's gold standard of presidential autobiographies.

Dan Rather

#39. In the mid-nineties, I quit my job as a senior feature writer at 'The Mail' on Sunday in the U.K. and became a 'ghost writer,' collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, soldiers and sporting legends who needed help in penning their autobiographies.

Michael Robotham

#40. I don't want to get into autobiographies; I don't want to talk about myself.

Rollie Fingers

#41. 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

#42. [Autobiographies] are all the same - it's always rags-to-riches or I-slept-with-so-and-so. Damned if I'm going to say that.

Deborah Kerr

#43. Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.

Jeff Dunham

#44. Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.

Gary Kemp

#45. The surroundings householders crave are glorified autobiographies ghost-written by willing architects and interior designers who, like their clients, want to show off.

T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings

#46. If you want to turn a vision into reality, you have to give 100% and never stop believing in your dream.

Arnold Schwarzenegger