Autobiographical Quotes

For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing. ~ John Darnielle

I wouldn't say 'Frances Ha' is autobiographical, but it's definitely very personal. ~ Noah Baumbach

Generally, I don't pencil, especially with the autobiographical comics, although I've usually planed out composition in my head during the scripting stage. I like to work directly in ink, to keep the spontaneity and expression conveyed by a less worked over line. ~ Jeffrey Brown

Silence in the shell of a city, no baby crying, no car honking, no ambulance shrieking, no lovers moaning, no drunks throwing up in the alley, no lights, nothing but wind and rain and snow in its season and rust and a rattling of open doors and carcass smell. It was a possibility like a brain tumor or a scorpion bite. ~ Anne Roiphe

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them. ~ Alison Bechdel

I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with. ~ Laura Z. Hobson

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

The stuff I write isn't strictly autobiographical, but it's personal, if that makes any sense. It draws all these little incidents and people out of my life and then contorts them. ~ Diablo Cody

If you think of any long-term artist that makes music throughout several decades, you would hope that it's autobiographical and a form of self-expression, and that's certainly how I approach my music. ~ DJ Shadow

The novel is apparently autobiographical and is being publicised as such but Doust has done with his material what so many autobiographical novelists fail to do: he has turned it into a shapely story, with no extraneous material or diversions and with an absolutely consistent and convincing narrative voice.' - Sydney Morning Herald ~ Jon Doust

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse. ~ John Barton

There's an analogy I came up with once for an interviewer who asked me how much of my material was autobiographical," Octavia says. "I said that the life experience of a fiction writer is like butter in cookie dough: it's a crucial part of flavor and texture - you certainly couldn't leave it out - but if you've done it right, it can't be discerned as a separate element. There shouldn't be a place that anyone can point to and say, There--she's talking about her miscarriage, or Look--he wrote that because his wife had an affair ~ Carolyn Parkhurst

Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place. ~ Antonio Damasio

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I would like to do something autobiographical, set to music. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to try. ~ Phoebe Snow

There is no doubt that this film is autobiographical, but at the same time it also tries to portray an ordinary couple in a language that everyone can understand. ~ Sophie Marceau

Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical. You've got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That's how they know you're not kidding. ~ Bruce Springsteen

I would like to imagine my life next to you, having fun and laughing at so many things, discovering new places, new people, new cultures, well, doing these kind of things mutually, enjoy spending time together. ~ Ikrame Selkani

It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical. ~ James Taylor

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Memory means different things to psychologists. Autobiographical memory is an interesting case because it straddles the most basic of the distinctions that scientists make between types of memory: that between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events). Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory). Another important distinction is that between explicit or declarative memory (in which the contents of memory are accessible to consciousness) and implicit or non-declarative memory (which is unconscious). As we will see, this distinction is particularly important when it comes to the question of how memory is affected by trauma and extreme emotion. ~ Charles Fernyhough

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction. ~ Lisa Unger

The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to which you return - even if it happens not to be where you came from - to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you've worn and the costumes you've gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods - Eastern philosophical thought abounds with that motif, Taoist thought, Hindu thought, Chinese thought. The "forest dweller," the last stage on life's way. Think of those Chinese paintings of the old man under the mountain, the old Chinese man all alone under the mountain, receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business. ~ Philip Roth

Readers," continued Miss Winter, "are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work. ~ Diane Setterfield

Language allows us to represent autobiographical events in the past, present and future; we can imagine events that have not yet happened, that we wish to happen or fear will happen. Jerome Bruner first proposed narratives as the best candidate for how people give meaning to the world, themselves and dominated in our everyday representation of our lives, rather than narrower units that featured in the information processing paradigm at that time. ~ Jacqui Stedmon

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development - part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" - has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so - and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few - have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. ~ James Shapiro

My two Jamaican cousins ... were studying engineering. 'That's where the money is,' Mom advised ... I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math ... Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk ... and eight Nobel Prize winners ... In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC.
Autobiographical comments on his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career. ~ Colin Powell

Death is like a broken jar that you re trying to fix over and over again but it s not doable at all because the people who pass away can t come back, but they taught us love, admiration and joy that will last forever in our hearts. ~ Ikrame Selkani

As the language areas of the left hemisphere enter their sensitive period during the middle of the second year of life, grammatical language in the left integrates with the interpersonal and prosodic elements of communication already well developed in the right. As the cortical language centers mature, words are joined together to make sentences and can be used to express increasingly complex ideas flavored with emotion. As the frontal cortex continues to expand and connect with more neural networks, memory improves and a sense of time slowly emerges and autobiographical memory begins to connect the self with places and events, within and across time. The emerging narratives begin to organize the nascent sense of self and become the bedrock of our sense of self in interpersonal and physical space ~ Louis Cozolino

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

anticipated this trend in the 1950s, when it used Jackson Pollock's action paintings as the backdrop for a fashion shoot for its spring collection. For Indiana the experience was a salutary one. The wordage he utilised in his paintings had always been carefully chosen and carried great emotional resonance, much of it directly autobiographical. He was not a neutralist. He was not attempting to transform the word 'love' into a slogan or logo, but that's what happened anyway, and the effect it had on his reputation as an artist was considerable. Because of the commercial proliferation of the LOVE ~ Rob Chapman

They used to treat sheep carcasses with Lithium so if the Coyotes went after the herd and bit on the treated carcasses, the got so sick they kept their teeth to themselves. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I categorically resist this idea that films are supposed to be autobiographical and the only stories you tell are about your own life. ~ Stephen Daldry

I believe that almost all important, useful ideas are simple. Peter Whittle has recently put it nicely in an autobiographical essay. "If a piece of work is heavy and complicated then it is wrong." ... Some writers feel that to express their ideas in simple terms is degrading. Some use complexity to disguise the paucity of their material. In fact, simplicity is a virtue and when, as here, it is both original and useful, it can represent a real advance in knowledge. ~ Dennis Lindley

Autobiographical writing acts as a timeless testament to each person's epic record of adventure, heartache, road to perdition, and achievement of a spiritual life devoid of the consternation, trepidation, foreboding fear, and inconsolably hankering for what is unattainable for humankind. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren't they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I'm not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in "The Crack-Up" or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim. ~ Kate Zambreno

The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life. ~ John Berger

People ask, 'Are your things autobiographical?,' and I think, no, they're not autobiographical directly, but of course my life has informed my work. ~ Andrea Arnold

The first book I ever wrote was in fourth grade and it was called 'Billy's Booger.' It was an autobiographical piece about a kid who was really bad at math. ~ William Joyce

The loudness of tone in Jane Eyre is undoubtedly effective in communicating tension and frustration, but the style does of course have its related limitations. It precludes the use of the small suggestive detail or the quiet but telling observation that Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot are so good at. In such a fortissimo performance
as this, the pianissimo gets drowned out, or noted only as an incongruity (which helps to account for the book's moments of unintended comic bathos). Again, it makes the whole question of modulation of tone a difficult one,6 and it is also hard to manage irony elegantly, as the Brocklehurst and Ingram portraits show.
There is unconscious ambiguity but little deliberate irony in Jane Eyre. Hence the remarkable unity of critical interpretation of the book - the reader knows all too well what he is meant to think about the heroine and the subsidiary characters. The novel does not merely request our judicious sympathy for the heroine, it demands
that we see with her eyes, think in her terms, and hate her enemies, not just intermittently (as in David Copperfield) but in toto. It was, incidentally, because James Joyce recognised the similar tendency of Stephen Hero that he reshaped his autobiographical material as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, retaining the 'first-person effect' but building in stylistic and structural
irony that would guard against the appearance of wholesale authorial endorsement of Stephen. ~ Ian Gregor

I occasionally experience the discomfort of people assuming my work is autobiographical. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Each one of my films is personal; each one of my films is emotionally autobiographical. And I like directors who do that. ~ Jason Reitman

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised. ~ David Leavitt

The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together. ~ Tracy Chapman

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning. ~ Nick Hornby

warriors. In 2007 Cooper fought a Chinese long-sword instructor on a Hong Kong rooftop - he never thought the experience would help him write battle scenes. In addition to being a member of the Mongoliad writing team, Cooper has written articles for various magazines. His autobiographical piece "Growing Up Black and White," published in Seattle Weekly, was awarded Social Issues Reporting Article of the Year by the ~ Neal Stephenson

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. ~ Francois Truffaut

What distinguishes the various kinds of fears is the combination and amount of the raw materials involved. What ties together all instances of fear is the awareness that a threat to well-being is present or is soon very likely to occur. In short, in order to be felt as fear, components of a nonconscious defensive motivational state have to invade and become a presence98 in conscious awareness. This can only happen in organisms that have the capacity to both be aware of brain representations of internal and external events and to know in a personal, autobiographical sense that the event is happening to them - someone has to be home in the brain in order to feel fear when the defensive state knocks on the door.99 ~ Joseph E. Ledoux

Because of the wonderfully positive response to 'Life's That Way,' I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff - maybe another book. I don't know. It doesn't help that I'm lazy. ~ Jim Beaver

There certainly is no secret in that there are plenty of people who don't like plenty of my movies. Each one of my films is personal; each one of my films is emotionally autobiographical. And I like directors who do that. With each one of my films, I'm exploring one of my own issues and I try to expose myself a little in the film. ~ Jason Reitman

Well, let me try again,' he said. 'If it be true, and no doubt it is, that the proper study of mankind is man, it is also true that man is best studied in the books that he has written about himself; and all books, whatever their subject matter, are in essence autobiographical... Wherefore, it is clear - or is it? - that writers of books are what I have called them, the most fascinating people in the world. ~ Peter Ruber

I'd liked my first record, it was autobiographical and beautiful. ~ Lana Del Rey

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story. ~ Bobbie Ann Mason

One of the strongest features of Puritanism is its autobiographical tendency, its passionate self-regard. ~ Tom Paulin

Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life. ~ Kim Edwards

There's always going to be a little bit of autobiographical content to everything. It's how you lend some authority to what you write - you give it that weight by drawing on your direct experiences and indirect experiences from people that you know well, or a little. ~ Ian Anderson

For the courage to write above myself;
For the guts to shout down the Critic within;
Fir the willingness to release the past, the future,
I thank You, that which Inspires. ~ Catherine W. Scott

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

I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory. ~ Oliver Sacks

Beautiful day out there," I said, perching on the stool and crossing my legs. "It's autumn, Sunday, great weather, and crowded everywhere you go. Relaxing indoors like this is the best thing you can do on such a nice day. It's exhausting to get into those crowds. And the air is bad. I mostly do laundry on Sundays - wash the stuff in the morning, hang it out on the roof of my dorm, take it in before the sun goes down, do a good job of ironing it. I don't mind ironing at all. There's a special satisfaction in making wrinkled things smooth. And I'm pretty good at it, too. Of course, I was lousy at it at first. I put creases in everything. After a month of practice, though, I knew what I was doing. So Sunday is my day for laundry and ironing. I couldn't do it today, of course. Too bad: wasted a perfect laundry day. ~ Haruki Murakami

All art is autobiographical. You can only create what you are. ~ Dale Carnegie

The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal. ~ Alice Munro

And, again, this story needs to be revised, is under revision as I type these words. The only way to write an autobiography, I suppose, is to keep writing indefinitely. As soon as your fingers stop moving, this act - your fingers stalling on the keyboard - changes the story. There. I can't keep up. And this idea that it should all be working toward something, that the autobiographical subject in the present tense should be working through the biggest puzzle of her life and arriving somehow at... something. Something big. At what? Happiness? Understanding? Forgiveness? A baby? A book?

I have not arrived. ~ Jill Christman

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography. ~ Federico Fellini

Rather than attend to a world considered as if it's out there, I have to start to attend to me. That led to some things that I never wanted it to lead to, person as a sort of psychological miasma. I started to get wrapped up in self, and then, for the first time, self did become an autobiographical self. ~ Vito Acconci

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake. ~ Amity Gaige

First novels were always at least somewhat autobiographical, ~ Meg Wolitzer

The Positive Paradigm is:

. . . a new, inclusive reality map, one people worldwide can easily comprehend and agree upon. It is equally compatible with scriptures and science, bridging the gap between them. It fulfills Einstein's intuited search for the Unified Field Theory, picturing how all parts of creation are related, interwoven and interdependent.

Working with the Positive Paradigm empowers the "substantially new manner of thinking," which, Einstein said, is necessary "if mankind is to survive."
For thousands of years, this genesis formula, the very heart of the creative process, was hidden as the secret treasure of initiates. Its knowledge was transmitted exclusively to qualified students in the inner circles of monastic schools. When Einstein intuited the theory of relativity and made it available to the general public, its long-foreseen abuse materialized. To Einstein's horror, it was misused to explode atomic bombs.

This context justifies making the positive application of Einstein's inspired vision equally public now. For in its traditional context, this three-part formula is an essential piece of the knowledge puzzle. It has the powerful potential to offset earlier abuse with opposite and equally unifying results. A timely shift to the Positive Paradigm could tip the scales of history in favor of human survival.
p. 11. ~ Patricia E. West

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction. ~ P.D. James

A lot of first novels are coming-of-age stories. A lot are autobiographical. ~ Stacey D'Erasmo

I have never pondered over questions that are not questions. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

To me, the most autobiographical line was: 'My make-up may be flaking but my smile still stays on.' That was true. No matter how ill Freddie felt, he never grumbled to anyone or sought sympathy of any kind. It was his battle, no one else's, and he always wore a brave face against the ever-increasing odds against him. ~ Jim Hutton

But in the act of attempting to imitate I discovered that I had a voice of my own. Whether I liked it or not was another matter. I found that I was my best or that I pleased myself most or came closest to my goals when I was tapped into something autobiographical. ~ Guy Maddin

None of my movies are autobiographical. ~ Susanne Bier

I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical." ~ Jamaica Kincaid

I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is. ~ Joe Haldeman

[I]nternalized experiences of selfhood are linked to autobiographical narratives, which are linked to biographies, legal testimonies, and medical case histories, which are linked to forms of therapy and theories of the subject. . . ~ Anthony Kenny

All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extension. ~ Raina Telgemeier

We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report. ~ Julian Barnes

My education was interrupted only by my schooling. ~ Winston S. Churchill

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject? ~ Yiyun Li

It's actually easier to do autobiographical stories. The story is already there. It's a matter of carving away what doesn't fit rather than building up from nothing. ~ Craig Thompson

Just because I write in the first person doesn't mean that all my songs are autobiographical. ~ Thalia Zedek

Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it's purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it's going to fail. ~ Nick Flynn

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there. ~ John Darnielle

One form of insecurity of attachment, called "disorganized/disoriented", has been associated with marked impairments in the emotional, social, and cognitive domains, and a predisposition toward a clinical condition known as dissociation in which the capacity to function in an organized, coherent manner is at times impaired.

Studies have also found that youths with a history of disorganized attachments are at great risk of expressing hostility with their peers and have the potential for interpersonal violence as they mature (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobwitz, 1999; Carlson, 1998). This disorganized form of attachment has been proposed to be associated with the caregiver's frightened, frightening, or disoriented behavior with the child. Such experiences create a state of alarm in the child. The parents of these children often have an autobiographical narrative finding, as revealed in the Adult Attachment Interview, of unresolved trauma or grief that appears as a disorientation in their narrative account of their childhoods. Such linguistic disorientation occurs during the discussion of loss or threat from childhood experiences. Lack of resolution appears to be associated with parental behaviors that are incompatible with an organized adaptation on the part of the child. Lack of resolution of trauma or grief in a parent can lead to parental behaviors that create "paradoxical", unsolvable, and problematic situations for the child. The attachment figure is intended to be the s ~ Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point! ~ Cecily Von Ziegesar

Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue. ~ Cate Marvin

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state. ~ Paul Schrader

I read a lot of autobiographical stories, and I write plays and prose. And I play piano and cello. A lot of my downtime is devoted to that. ~ Alexis Dziena

Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form. ~ Gunter Grass

I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions. ~ Harvey Pekar

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing. ~ Natalie Merchant

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.' ~ Sophie Kinsella

It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Even the infamous 2002 Bali bombing mastermind, Imam Samudra from the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Jamaah Islamiyah, funded his attack in which more than 200 people were murdered with the $150,000 he obtained by hacking into Western bank accounts and credit lines. Samudra was technologically savvy and while in prison wrote an autobiographical manifesto containing a chapter titled "Hacking, Why Not?" In the book, Samudra shared his hacking and "carding" techniques with his disciples, encouraging them "to take the holy war into cyberspace by attacking U.S. computers, with the particular aim of committing credit card fraud, called 'carding,' " to fund operations. ~ Marc Goodman

Friends and family do not believe you write fiction. They truly believe that every word you write is either autobiographical or based on them. I once had a character say that she never wanted to be invited to another children's birthday party, and I never received another children's birthday party invitation ever again. ~ Liane Moriarty