Autobiography Quotes
Most popular autobiography quotes
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.
Autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.
When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad things you did do - well, that's memoirs.
Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you.
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
Fiction is the higher autobiography.
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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.
In a good autobiography the chaos of life's experience (truth) must be given some kind of order or pattern (design).
All autobiography is self-indulgent.
To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
Autobiography is a life writing its life.
Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
In a way, an autobiography seems to me like a household book of accounts—what has been acquired, to what purpose has it been put, was too much paid for it, and did it teach you anything?
An interim report—that is what an autobiography is.
Autobiography, the confession of a person to himself instead of the priest—generally gets absolution too easily.
Every autobiography...becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.
Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
Writing the story of your own life, I now know, is an agonizing experience, a bit like drilling your own teeth.
If you do not want to explore an egoism you should not read autobiography.
Hiring someone to write your autobiography is like hiring someone to take a bath for you.
The New York Times bestseller list only has four categories. There ought to be a fifth category for autobiography. Or perhaps we should call it handicapped nonfiction.
I have no guarantee of what is written here but memory, a known cheat.
This is something like digging for oil, finding it, and then noticing a diamond mine at the same site.
Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.
You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arms, like a drunk, and say, "And then I did this and it was so interesting."
The chief danger memoirists face is starring in their own stories, and becoming fascinated.
But that perhaps is the point of any memoir—to walk with the dead and yet see them with our eyes, from our vantage point.
I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.
A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing.
At this point in literary history, it's understood that memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
Memoirs ... the backstairs of history.
When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do—well, that's Memoirs.
Memoir in America is an atrocity arms race. A memoir that reveals incest is trumped by one that reveals bestiality, and that, in turn, is driven from the bestseller list by one that reveals incestuous bestiality.
Memoir is like a patchwork quilt—a log cabin pioneer way of piecing together experience. It satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.
Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.
