Top 100 Quotes About Autobiography
#1. I had said before that I'd never write an autobiography because I've been around, and there's a lot that I've seen and heard that stays with me. That's just mine. I didn't want to do a kiss-and-tell, as some of my peers have.
Dionne Warwick
#2. If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.
Salman Rushdie
#3. I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
Philip Roth
#4. I had a few people ask me if I might one day write my own autobiography. I just told them, 'It's already being written; through my books.
T.S. Wieland
#5. I think I might be the very first person who initiated the AutoQuotery (as in, AutoBiography) practice!
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#6. If you believe the past can't be changed, you haven't read a celebrity's autobiography.
Sam Ewing
#8. One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
Carlos Fuentes
#9. There is no hint here that preaching is thought of primarily as self-expression
of subjective experience or feeling-disclosure or autobiography or 'telling one's story' so as to neglect Scripture."275 It is the Word that is to be preached.
Ben Witherington III
#10. When I left the Senate in 1979, there were several publishers who had approached me about writing an autobiography, and I knew that politicians write books for many reasons, but at that time, I just thought I wasn't ready and my story wasn't over, and I knew I had a new life ahead of me.
Edward Brooke
#11. Photos are our autobiography, a way of telling who we are.
Jan Phillips
#12. But, Tarantino has seen all of my movies. He's seen my good stuff, he's seen my bad stuff, he's seen the ones I directed, he's read my autobiography. There's an awful lot of things he knows about me, all of which I think had something to do with his casting.
David Carradine
#13. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Oscar Wilde
#14. I usually balance out autobiography with goofy, amusing stuff to help keep the humour in my more serious work.
Jeffrey Brown
#15. And then I wrote my first autobiography when I - well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I've written about one book every two years.
Joan Collins
#16. Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?
Jill Ker Conway
#17. I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography.
Kathy Griffin
#18. Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
W. H. Auden
#19. In 1994, to motivate me to complete my pilot's license, my good friend, Gregg Maryniak, gave me Charles Lindbergh's autobiography of his solo flight across the Atlantic.
Peter Diamandis
#20. Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
Evelyn Waugh
#21. I employed my wife for three years to sit in the attic and type up my autobiography, 700 pages, organise everywhere I go. I'm paying the normal rate of tax on the money I take out for myself.
Ken Livingstone
#22. I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story.
Beth Ditto
#23. The theme of my autobiography could only be repetition.
Mason Cooley
#25. I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'
Tao Lin
#26. I don't like the word 'autobiography.' I rather like the term 'autofiction.' The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it.
Marjane Satrapi
#27. I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.
Paul Auster
#29. The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up.
Jack Dee
#30. These two "speech communities," as it were, are Hurston's great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.
Zora Neale Hurston
#31. When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.
George Vecsey
#32. In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.
Robert Penn Warren
#33. My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story.
Valeria Luiselli
#34. In writing the autobiography, I can really chuckle when I look at the songs. I was acting out the part. I saw myself as a victim.
Boy George
#35. If I wrote an autobiography, I'd have to sue the author for defamation ...
Seeley James
#36. Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.
Erica Jong
#37. A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.
Mary Antin
#38. The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.
Gilbert Highet
#39. If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian.
Nellie Melba
#40. 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.
Raymond Carver
#41. Nietzsche claimed that a philosopher's system of thought always arises from his autobiography, and I believe that to be true for all therapists - in fact, for anyone who thinks about thought. At a conference approximately
Irvin D. Yalom
#42. 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
#43. So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.
Michael Palin
#44. He had to compose an "autobiography" that proved that he had been brought to his present predicament by a "lack of inner character," and moral perversity and mental sickness that had made him unre-ceptive to Communism. He
Dumitru Bacu
#45. In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my fact-less autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.
Fernando Pessoa
#46. Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."8
Thomas S. Kuhn
#47. I was a fan of the Marx Brothers. One of them had this character where he pretended not to be able to talk, but then he wrote this autobiography called 'Harpo Speaks!' He wrote about how he quit school at nine years old to become a professional.
Nile Rodgers
#48. Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
Doris Lessing
#49. 'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.
Kate Christensen
#50. A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#51. On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
Paul Murray Kendall
#52. An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.
Roald Dahl
#53. My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.
Karrine Steffans
#55. In [Yogananda's] celebrated Autobiography of a Yogi, he offers a stunning account of the 'cosmic consciousness' reached on the upper levels of yogic practice, and numerous interesting perspectives on human nature from the yogic and Vedantic points of view.
Robert S Ellwood
#56. Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.
W.P. Kinsella
#57. I keep stacks of Autobiography of a Yogi around the house, and I give it out constantly to people. When people need 'regrooving,' I say read this, because it cuts to the heart of every religion.
George Harrison
#60. It seems to me that no autobiography can claim to document every detail of the author's life. That's impossible. There are
Sachin Tendulkar
#61. One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.
Joseph Barbera
#62. Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.
Linda Grant
#63. The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
#64. I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'
Alexandra Roach
#65. One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.
Alastair Campbell
#66. Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing - I'm a liar, in fact. That means I'm a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.
Alberto Moravia
#68. A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.
Imre Kertesz
#69. Many great people had been considered to be boring, like Nigel Mansell, but anyone who had read the racing driver's autobiography, "Clutch Down, Dick Out", would know that perception was way off the mark.
Mark Jackman
#70. But not even Hitler can damage the fells'
In 'The Tale of Beatrix Potter, A Autobiography' by Margaret Lane, first edition, page 170.
Beatrix Potter
#71. I want an autobiography without revealing any personal information.
Diana Ross
#72. In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe
Salman Rushdie
#73. The trajectory of my writing has moved further and further away from autobiography. My first stories in Confessions of a Falling Woman worked familiar territory - places I had lived, people I knew, my life as an actor in New York - and many were prompted by or grounded in personal experience.
Debra Dean
#74. One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography.
Theodor Haecker
#75. I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school.
Junot Diaz
#76. The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V.S. Naipaul
#77. A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.
Robert Dessaix
#78. If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
P. J. O'Rourke
#79. There's something presumptuous in writing an autobiography, as if people's interest in your life is a given.
Simon Pegg
#80. It's the truth, though rarely admitted, that every autobiographical work has a touch of fiction and every fiction has a touch of autobiography.
Santosh Kumar Das
#81. Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted, far worse than an autobiography: and its rewards were greater than I expected.
Dick Francis
#82. Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.
Robert Silverberg
#83. A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however, eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor.
Bertrand Russell
#84. The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.
Patricia Hampl
#85. All criticism is a form of autobiography
Oscar Wilde
#86. 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.
Kate Christensen
#87. The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
Erica Jong
#88. Comedy and terror and autobiography and comics and literature-they're all the same thing. To me.
Patton Oswalt
#89. A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.
Fawn M. Brodie
#90. Washington never wrote an autobiography, and his diaries are largely confined to accounts of the weather and lists of the people who came to dinner.
Robert F. Dalzell Jr.
#91. So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.
Harold Brodkey
#92. I didn't think before that I'd done enough to justify publishing an autobiography but after 40 years in show business I'm now ready to tell my story.
Cilla Black
#93. To write an autobiography, you've got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible, without embarrassing anyone.
Cary Grant
#94. What's upsetting about an autobiography is that the final chapter is always missing. I mean, you want the death, don't you?
Ian McKellen
#96. Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.
Tom Robbins
#97. This sounds like my autobiography, but I thought this would be a good time to sound off about myself, as I think that I have been silent too long about my views and opinions.
Bob Kane
#98. Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.
Lisel Mueller
#99. I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.
John Burnham Schwartz
#100. I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography.
Mark Twain
