Autobiographies Quotes

There is no public record of Barack Obama's (or Stanley Ann Dunham's) being in the CIA. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn't. The reader may consider the information and, based on background, life experiences, and ability to keep an open mind, may come to either conclusion.
But any explanation of why Barack Obama would not have mentioned a word of his Most Excellent Pakistani Adventure in either of his two autobiographies requires a conspiracy theory that might cast doubt on either the sanity or the sincerity fothe person proposing it. ~ Mondo Frazier

Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two. ~ Ellery Sedgwick

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

Sometimes, with autobiographies, it turns into a bit of score-settling. And looking back, I don't feel the way I did then, and you kind of grow up and let it go behind you. ~ Marc Almond

All autobiographies are alibi-ographies. ~ Clare Boothe Luce

What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great. ~ Miles Franklin

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies. ~ Steven Pinker

He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. ~ Clive Barker

This was inspired by my pediatrician, a relatively young man whom I called Dr. Handsome. I had assumed this was because his name was Dr. Hasen or Dr. Branson, but I recently found out his name was Dr. Ritger, so I guess I should have just died at age four when I decided to call my physician Dr. Handsome without so much as a pun to justify it. ~ Anna Kendrick

The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.
I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.

My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.
I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!

It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers. ~ Eskay Teel

I don't want to know about my biggest idols. I don't want to read their autobiographies, I don't want to find out what they're really like. ~ Meg White

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel. ~ John Dos Passos

Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things. ~ Paul Theroux

He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she'd seen them, touched them. She thought of the tattoos she'd seen: freak show exhibits some of them, others just shirtless laborers in the street with a message to their mothers pricked across their backs. It was not unknown, to write a book of blood. ~ Clive Barker

By fifth grade, I cracked a major development in strategy. I needed to get boys to talk to me. I wasn't pretty, but I could make them like me through the magic of conversation, or at least trick them into revealing some actionable knowledge and go from there. ~ Anna Kendrick

I love memoirs and autobiographies in general. ~ Brett Davern

I don't want to get into autobiographies; I don't want to talk about myself. ~ Rollie Fingers

I'm always embarrassed by those rugby player autobiographies which get written by journalists. ~ Peter Jackson

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?
I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!
Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born. ~ Robertson Davies

I went to Hollywood. I put the action in Hollywood. I watched a lot of movies, maybe 100 or something close to that. I have tons of DVDs now at home. I don't know what to do with them because they're not useful anymore. My kids never watched them. I read a lot of autobiographies, listened to a lot of music by classical era composers like Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman and Leonard Bernstein. I listened to only that kind of music the entire time I was writing, even at home. ~ Michel Hazanavicius

One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely. ~ Lev Shestov

Read to your children all of the time
Novels and nursery rhymes
Autobiographies, even the newspaper
It doesn't mater; it's quality time
Because once upon a time
We grew up on stories in the voices in which they were told
We need words to hold us and the world to behold us
For us to truly know our souls ~ Taylor Mali

It would just be a pamphlet. Three pages. The first page would be Drugs I Have Taken and then a list. The next page would be People I Have Slept With and then another list. Then the last page would be Famous People I Have Partied With and then another list. Because that's all people write in their autobiographies. Cut out all the bullshit and it's just a three-page pamphlet. ~ Ryan Jarman

I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time. ~ Annette Bening

I read the book [My Life by Bill Clinton] completely. And I think it compares very favorably with Ulysses S. Grant's gold standard of presidential autobiographies. ~ Dan Rather

All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The Internet is dumb. The Internet, with all its access to brain research, anthropology journals, social studies networks, and biographies and autobiographies, can't begin to map the complexity of our lives, or how we each affect others. ~ Dee Williams

If you want to turn a vision into reality, you have to give 100% and never stop believing in your dream. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction . ~ A.S. Byatt

Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself. ~ Paul Stanley

In the Alco Ward a dispute had broken out over plagiarism. Incidentally, when I arrived there for the first time I did not have the slightest notion that I was crossing the threshold of a creative writing program, that I was entering a community of people of the pen, of writers who were incessantly creating their alcoholic autobiographies, recording their innermost feeling in cheap sixty-page notebooks that were called emotional journals, laboriously assembling their drunkard's confessions. ~ Jerzy Pilch

I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life. ~ Ranbir Kapoor

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. ~ John Ruskin

Of my private life I have nothing to say: it does not concern others. I have always had little liking for autobiographies and have no interest in anyone's affairs. History proper and novels hold no attractions for me except insofar as, I can discern there, as within our immortal Revolution, the adventures of the mind. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc. ~ George Seaton

Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie. ~ Gary Kemp

There are some men who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless - even to themselves - a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world. Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, or rather - for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the bearing of a man - that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account with Heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour. Whether this is a gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the falsehood and trickery of such men's lives, or whether they really hope to cheat Heaven itself, and lay up treasure in the next world by the same process which has enabled them to lay up treasure in this - not to question how it is, so it is. And, doubtless, such book-keeping (like certain autobiographies which have enlightened the world) cannot fail to prove serviceable, in the one respect of sparing the recording Angel some time and labour. ~ Charles Dickens

I love books and the latest autobiographies. I'm a Gemini and love being with people, but then again, I love my own company, which is when I read most. ~ Cilla Black

Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives. ~ Marilyn Ferguson

Aren't autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don't we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am. ~ Frederick Weisel

Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies. ~ Gelett Burgess

I trained as a librarian, and I run a bookstore. Fucking right I can use a gun ... if I have to engage somebody between the counter and the door, only the political autobiographies are in danger and who gives a fuck about those? ~ Jonathan L. Howard

I watched a lot of drunk players, too, I learned from the autobiographies published after they had retired. ~ Nick Hornby

I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one! ~ Anita Pallenberg

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age. ~ Roberto Bolano

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten? ~ John Cleese

In the mid-nineties, I quit my job as a senior feature writer at 'The Mail' on Sunday in the U.K. and became a 'ghost writer,' collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, soldiers and sporting legends who needed help in penning their autobiographies. ~ Michael Robotham

Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies. ~ Elia Kazan

[Autobiographies] are all the same - it's always rags-to-riches or I-slept-with-so-and-so. Damned if I'm going to say that. ~ Deborah Kerr