Autobiography Quotes - page 2

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form. (John Berger)
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces. View quote
Mary Antin
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
An autobiography can distort, facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies. It reveals the writer totally. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream. View quote
Clarence Darrow
I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
... when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are. Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least. View quote
Mark Twain
...an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell...-the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences. View quote
Mark Twain
An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy. View quote
Boris Becker
Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo-shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.”. View quote
Randall Jarrell
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down. (Guillermo Cabrera Infante)
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. View quote
Jane Smiley
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. View quote
David Carradine
In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world - God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator. View quote
Fulton Oursler
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. View quote
Raymond Carver
My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process. View quote
Mia Farrow
American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going. View quote
Harvey Pekar
I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story. View quote
Beth Ditto
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. View quote
Celia Johnson
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval. View quote
David Antin
I have a children's book already out and my autobiography. (Della Reese)
An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived. View quote
Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel
Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying. View quote
Humphrey Carpenter
I was trying to write an autobiography using prints and patterns that reference emotional, psychological, and personal development in my work, as a person growing up, figuring out who I was. I used fabrics to stand in for occurrences. View quote
Jim Hodges
The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory. View quote
Jonathan Lethem