Top 100 Quotes About Autobiography
#1. The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
Salman Rushdie
#2. Remember what I said. There's always a lot of autobiography in fiction and fiction in autobiography. It has to be that way otherwise they'd be unreadable (except by the author).
Nina Stibbe
#3. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.
John Dominic Crossan
#4. I've never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.
James Frey
#5. What we say about ourselves is always a form of fiction.
Marty Rubin
#6. If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.
Iain Sinclair
#7. I loved him with a passion of which I had no idea I was capable. I loved him partly to defend him against the world and partly because I genuinely believed we were soul mates.
Clare Balding
#8. Then one day in school, I turned round to the others and said, 'Dude, what if we started a band like All Time Low?
5 Seconds Of Summer
#9. The human face is the subtle yet visual autobiography of each person,
John O'Donohue
#10. What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening - all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke.
Bob Dylan
#11. These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.
Virginia Woolf
#12. Attempting to express a person's objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#13. If it is properly done, the 'as told to' autobiography represents how the subject wants his story told.
Albert Murray
#14. It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson's] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
Dorothy Parker
#15. 'Masquerade' is the autobiography of Wyclef Jean. A lot of people know me through my work with Carlos Santana or Destiny's Child, winning all those Grammy Awards, but you do not know what is going on inside me.
Wyclef Jean
#17. I won't write my autobiography because I never had an affair with Frank Sinatra, and if I had had, I wouldn't tell anyone.
Celia Johnson
#18. A home should be an intimate autobiography of the things that you like. One of the things I'm so keen on expressing is that, if you don't do it for yourself, if you're always seeking affirmation from outside, you'll never have a home. It'll just be a house.
Alexandra Stoddard
#19. Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.
Meghan Lamb
#20. I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book.'
Dick Van Dyke
#21. I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography.
June Foray
#22. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#23. You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.
Ellie Goulding
#24. Your limits are somewhere up there, waiting for you to reach beyond infinity.
Arnold Henry
#25. Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please.
Katandra Jackson Nunnally
#26. Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.
Arthur Smith
#27. 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
#28. I wasn't living on the edge, I had gone over it. Insanity was now the norm and I had to keep feeding it in order to maintain the new domain I had created for myself. I had one eye on the road and one on the rear view mirror when I wasn't pre-occupied with my beer, cigarettes or car stereo.
Steven C. Smith
#30. I got out of autobiography because my story is, I was famous, it was hard for me, I got into therapy. I had trouble with food, I got a nutritionist. There's no story there.
Courtney Thorne-Smith
#31. It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
Philip Roth
#32. Better to keep a good conscience with an empty purse, than to get a bad opinion of myself, with a full one.
David Crockett
#33. I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
Barry McGee
#34. In a novel there's not much autobiography. There are characters in transit. Naturally, I can project something of my experiences onto the characters, but they have their own autonomy, a personality that is often a mystery to me.
Dacia Maraini
#35. A freshman had to wear a black turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and a little black cap called a 'dink' on the back of his head," he wrote in his autobiography, Confessions of a Maverick
Dorothy Wickenden
#36. You should not do an autobiography if you want to tell the truth. There are a lot of things I know about people. If I can't say something good about a person, I don't want to say anything. And since I don't want to say anything bad, I won't write a book.
Abraham A. Ribicoff
#37. He said all I could do was tell them, so that is what I did, I told them all the long the short and the tall
David Clarke
#38. I feel like a little tug in a great storm. But I'm fastened to a great ship on ahead. It's going into port and can't lose it's way.
Patricia St. John
#40. You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive.
K.H. Rennie
#41. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Oscar Wilde
#42. With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.
Kate Zambreno
#43. It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.
David Sedaris
#44. Of course it's fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who've never met me, who don't know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he's just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was.
Michel Faber
#45. Live your dreams, not your fears! A.Hume
Albina Hume
#46. THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY is ostensibly an autobiography but in truth it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig's glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna's golden age, in which he grew up and flourished.
Ronald Harwood
#47. It is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come
Malcolm X
#48. Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.
Don DeLillo
#49. There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.
William Trevor
#50. Andy Anderson has written an autobiography in pictures, a life on the water. Salt is an eloquent modern paean to the strength and beauty of the coastal waters he cares for at a time when that environment is in danger of disappearing.
Guy De La Valdene
#51. As mankind 'matures,' as it becomes more possible to be frank in the scrutiny of the self and others and in the publication of one's findings, biography and autobiography will take the place of fiction for the investigation and discussion of character.
H.G.Wells
#52. Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'
Maya Angelou
#53. I caught a cold and didn't have time to work on my autobiography.
Julie Doucet
#54. Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.
Larry Wall
#55. Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
#56. I thought of muses as inventions to protect one's insight, to avoid questions like "Where do your ideas come from?" Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction.
Toni Morrison
#57. Sit back, enjoy the ride and hang out with me for a little while. ( sorry, cheesy driving metaphor!)
Miley Cyrus
#58. For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography
Pablo Picasso
#60. A hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.
Samuel Johnson
#61. My approach to the work is the same, whether I had the lead or a supporting role. I consider myself a character actor in the true sense of the word. Unless I'm doing my autobiography, I'm playing a character.
Ving Rhames
#62. Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
George Orwell
#63. Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.
Neville Cardus
#64. I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead
Samuel Goldwyn
#66. An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.
Claud Cockburn
#67. In fact Sarah Palin has created more jobs than Obama has. She created eleven jobs fact-checking at the AP just for the Palin autobiography.
Ann Coulter
#68. If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.
Virginia Woolf
#69. Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
Hilaire Belloc
#70. I won't ever direct a film. And I certainly won't write an autobiography. Only self-obsessed people want to write or talk about themselves!
Kajol
#71. After reading Eminem's autobiography, which I did because I'm so interested in him as an artist, I respect him a lot. Even though he seems angry and mad, he's had to fight so many demons in his life.
Taryn Manning
#73. I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.
Kelly Cherry
#74. I read Gloria Swanson's autobiography just because I wanted to know what it was like in the time.
Berenice Bejo
#75. Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.
Robert Pinsky
#76. Let's face it, it's only called Scrubs because I'm saving 'Zach Braff' for my autobiography.
Zach Braff
#77. If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I'm sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don't do that, I've hamstrung the melody.
Ben Folds
#78. I've been cheered by thousands, booed by thousands, but nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those ten minutes before you fall asleep.
Andre Agassi
#79. There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.
Thomas Szasz
#80. I found the project to be a bit quiet (that is, dull), which may have led to the manuscript's current confabulation - a pseudo autobiography in which the speaker portrays herself as a fifteen-year-old girl/cheetah amalgam.
Julie Schumacher
#81. Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Anne Carson
#82. A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought): Aide-memoire Reportage Work of art Topography Erotica/Pornography Advertisement Abstract image Literature Text Autobiography Compositional Functional illustration Snapshot
William Boyd
#83. I never want to make screw-you money like the rest of the financial services industry.
Dan Price
#84. I think when life gets heavy, people look for an escape. "The Love Boat" is an escape. We have happy endings. You don't see many of those around. I think it gave people a vicarious adventure.
Gavin MacLeod
#85. Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That's like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children.
Amy Tan
#86. Just as truly as the Confessions are the autobiography of St. Augustine, The City of God is the autobiography of the Church written by the most Catholic of her great saints.
Augustine Of Hippo
#87. Some of you have been waiting for years to read this, the final volume of my autobiography.
Brandon Sanderson
#88. The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.
Dimitra Ekmektsis
#89. Autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.
George Eliot
#90. Former South Africa President Nelson Mandela announced Tuesday he will begin writing his autobiography. He spent 25 years in prison before being elected to public office. In America, we do it the other way around.
Argus Hamilton
#91. The first song Ben taught me was Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water', when i was 10, and I would play it on the top string with one finger. I did it so much that there was a massive crease in the skin and i think I must have driven everyone crazy, playing that same song all the time,
5 Seconds Of Summer
#92. I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.
Richard Simmons
#93. Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
Bernard Berenson
#94. Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.
Jane Smiley
#95. 'My Life' is not an autobiography. It's just music.
Mary J. Blige
#96. In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, he speaks of the difference between physics and biology:
Oliver Sacks
#97. Everyone plagiarizes me. Ever since I wrote my autobiography.
Joe Biden
#99. One of the greatest gifts in this world is the ability to make others smile. - The Unauthorized Autobiography of Jonathan Fisher
J.E.B. Spredemann
#100. Even wondered about the difference?
Autobiography: The usually self-serving accounts of personal accomplishments by a public figure.
Memoir: The usually self-serving accounts of someone whose only accomplishments are often self-pity and vindictiveness.
Raul Ramos Y Sanchez
