Autobiography Quotes

Autobiography is a precious broken vase pieced painstakingly together still showing the chips and cracks. It is a broken truth revealing snapshots of a cracked and chipped life pieced pieced painstakingly together. ~ Chloe Thurlow

My own [story] is the simplest ... it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence - and yet I find it the hardest to begin. ~ Julian Barnes

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that he would return to several ~ Brent Schlender

If I could write an autobiography for fear, it would read like this:
__________

Hi, my name is Fear. F-E-A-R. But you are going to call me a lot of other things as you start to get closer to me. I'm terribly unoriginal. I'm like every has-been out there, but you give me way more credit than I deserve. You should keep doing that. I like it when you make me bigger than I actually am. I'm going to make you feel alone, and I like it when you believe you're the only one who's ever felt this way. You think I'm custom-catered to fit you, but I'm really no different than the brand of me your best friend wears. I'm a ballad lurking in the hearts of a billion people, and I will do anything to keep you from realizing that I am just the same song on repeat. You all know all my words.
I'm pretty jealous though. I want you alone with me at night. I'm not afraid to say I'm greedy or that I don't want to share you. I'm a territorial lover, and I would rather you not have solid and deep conversations at dinner parties or find a community that doesn't leave your side. I wrote you a story a long time ago, and I don't want you to figure out that you've outgrown the plotline.
I wonder why you don't get over me sometimes, but then the realization hits me: You come back because you know I want you. You come back because you know the sound of my voice. You come back because you know the way I move and how I shut you down. You've stood face-to-face with me so many times and ~ Hannah Brencher

Remember, Matt, it's an exercise. That's called autobiography, the second enemy of listening. ~ Hartley Stevens

Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two. ~ Ellery Sedgwick

One of the most moving narratives of modern history is the story of how men and women languishing under various forms of oppression came to acquire, often at great personal cost, the sort of technical knowledge necessary for them to understand their own condition more deeply, and so acquire some of the theoretical armoury essential to change it ... There is no reason why literary critics should not turn to autobiography or anecdotalism, or simply slice up their texts and deliver them to their publishers in a cardboard box, if they are not so politically placed as to need emancipatory knowledge. ~ Terry Eagleton

If the thing you want beyond anything cannot be, it is much better to recognize it and go forward, instead of dwelling on one's regrets and hopes. ~ Agatha Christie

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain. ~ Jeanette Winterson

A freshman had to wear a black turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and a little black cap called a 'dink' on the back of his head," he wrote in his autobiography, Confessions of a Maverick ~ Dorothy Wickenden

I would like to read some books: I don't have time; I would like to continue working on my autobiography. ~ Gunther Schuller

I'm going to be super successful one day, and I'm going to write a book. It's going to be a kickass autobiography. And this is how it always happens in the book. This is just that part of the book where the character is going through hard times. This is that sucky part of the story. Just get through a few more pages, and it's going to have an amazing ending. ~ Ronda Rousey

I've been working on my autobiography, just pecking away in longhand. The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more detail you recall. It's not all pleasant! ~ Pat Morita

I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography. ~ June Foray

Anyone with an autobiography is almost definitely an evil piece of shit. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

When I was first approached about doing an autobiography, I said, 'absolutely not.' But when I sat down, memories came pouring out. It wrote very quickly - I think there was an emotional impulse, because once I started in, the story itself carried me along. It was a very intense writing period and took a year and change to finish. ~ Julia Cameron

After I'm dead, I want to ghostwrite my autobiography. ~ Jarod Kintz

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

Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn't come through. It was just not there anymore. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew. ~ Anne Moody

Tell the Truth. Make it Special.

Life's a Beach. And then you Drown.

Good Ideas cost no more than Bad Ones. ~ Justin Allison

I always think about Katharine Graham - she was the publisher of The Washington Post. In her autobiography she talks about the way her parents met. Her father was, I think, in New York just walking by on his way home and looked into a store and saw the lady that became his wife. It was just pure luck. And she said that it once again reminds her of the role that luck and chance play in our life. I really believe that, too. ~ Owen Wilson

All autobiographies are alibi-ographies. ~ Clare Boothe Luce

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me. ~ Stephen Fry

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood. ~ Robert Pinsky

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years. ~ Steve Martin

Let's face it, it's only called Scrubs because I'm saving 'Zach Braff' for my autobiography. ~ Zach Braff

Mary Welland was certainly lovely. She was gentle and kind. She remained my friend all the time I was in hospital. But there is a world of difference falling in love with a voice and remaining in love with a person you can see. From the moment I opened my eyes, Mary became a human instead of a dream and my passion evaporated. ~ Roald Dahl

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram. ~ H.L. Mencken

An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions. ~ Claud Cockburn

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything ... he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys. ~ Jack Kerouac Atop An Underwood Early Stories And Other Writings

EK made it a point to say she "flew" the author to her place. This author is supposedly so much more successful and is the one to contact her to have the book written, but EK had to pay air fair? On top of that, this stranger spent a week or so in her bed, kicking her hubby out? It's just weird. Reads more like an autobiography to me. ~ E.K. Blair

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

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else. ~ Cary Grant

Monotony is the only reward of the cautious ~ A. Somebody

President Obama admitted this week that a former girlfriend that he wrote about in his autobiography was made up and not a real person ... So Obama had an imaginary girlfriend. Big deal! He had an imaginary economic plan. It's all the same. ~ Jay Leno

I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places. ~ Kelly Cherry

A fast note about Ice-T's autobiography: There's a section where he tells a story about hanging out with Flavor Flav that involves going to Red Lobster in a Ferrari. I suspect the phrase "going to Red Lobster in a Ferrari" is the most accurate description of Flavor Flav anyone will ever come up with. ~ Shea Serrano

We were scared. I guess when you're in your twenties, that's how it is. You've got an adult body, but you're trying to make it work with a kid's emotions. With Marilyn and me, it was worse. Our kid emotions didn't even work. We'd been treated too poorly. ~ Tony Curtis

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

I spent most of my time floating on an inflatable raft in the pristine Mediterranean waters, my big belly curving toward the sun, reading (incongruously) The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It rocked me to my core. Malcolm's story opened a window onto a reality I had ignored. But the greatest revelation the book brought me was the possibility of profound human transformation. I was spellbound by his journey from the doped-up, numbers-running, woman-beating, street-hustling, pimping Malcolm Little to a proud, clean, literate, Muslim Malcolm X who taught that all white people were the Devil incarnate - to his final, spiritual transformation in Mecca. There he met white people from all over the world who received him as a brother, and he realized that "white," as he had been using the word, didn't mean skin color as much as it meant attitudes and actions some whites held toward non-whites - but that not all whites were racist. At the time of his murder, he was anything but the hatemonger portrayed in the American press. Somehow, through the horrors that had been his life, he had become a spiritual leader. How had this been possible? ~ Jane Fonda

Siamese twins are interesting because they are the only people who can write a biography and an autobiography at the same time. ~ Demetri Martin

Love and respect are above any law ~ Uri Jerzy Nachimson

Know before whom thou stands. Understand your friends for who they are, not who you wish them to be. Accept them for their flaws as well as their attributes. Turn to them for their strengths, what good stuff they can bring to your life, and forget about the rest. To ask for more only sets you up for failure. ~ Fran Drescher

No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. ~ H.L. Mencken

So this book is like a thank you. We want everyone to know the story of how four Western Sydney teenagers picked up their instruments and dreamt of being one of the biggest bands in the world. ~ 5 Seconds Of Summer

Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had "just always been placed there." The longer he pondered booksellers' indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. "Thinking about it made me angry," Josephy wrote in his autobiography, "and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult. ~ Bobby Bridger

The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today ... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow"
"Autobiography of an Historian", An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949). ~ G. M. Trevelyan

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

A recurring theme in his autobiography, as well as in his tales and almanacs, was his amusement at man's ability to rationalize what was convenient. At ~ Walter Isaacson

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

Any attempts at autobiography before the age of eighty seem pretty self-involved to me. There are a lot of smart middle aged people but not many wise ones. ~ Jimmy Buffett

If you believe the past can't be changed, you haven't read a celebrity's autobiography. ~ Sam Ewing

I have at last found my vocation; it is love! ~ Therese De Lisieux

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography, 'Why Not the Best?,' published in 1975. ~ Jonathan Raban

I read Gloria Swanson's autobiography just because I wanted to know what it was like in the time. ~ Berenice Bejo

Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion. ~ Anne Carson

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

My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives. ~ Diane Keaton

Autobiography is mostly alibiography. ~ Clare Boothe Luce

It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life I used all my potential and all my talents and pushed myself to the limit. I could not have fought any harder. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

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

Those is seek to profit from the torment of others will eventually pay the piper ~ Tony Alleyne

I wasn't living on the edge, I had gone over it. Insanity was now the norm and I had to keep feeding it in order to maintain the new domain I had created for myself. I had one eye on the road and one on the rear view mirror when I wasn't pre-occupied with my beer, cigarettes or car stereo. ~ Steven C. Smith

Under the seams runs the pain. ~ Anne Carson

'Masquerade' is the autobiography of Wyclef Jean. A lot of people know me through my work with Carlos Santana or Destiny's Child, winning all those Grammy Awards, but you do not know what is going on inside me. ~ Wyclef Jean

Wanting to leave communist Russia is all fine and well | Actually leaving the country is where you might run into a few setbacks. Obtaining a visa for a simple vacation outside the soviet block was a long and arduous process. To immigrate to a free society was about as easy as finding whiskey in a church. ~ Gary Govich

I had a long talk with my dear Fat Mary that night, because I had many questions. Could someone actually be beaten to death by such a nun? Did Mother Rufina, the new Superior, know that Sister Clotilda was so cruel? Who let her work with children? Could nuns go to hell?
Fat Mary told me she didn't know the answers to my questions, but she reminded me that it was her role to take my worries and burdens and keep them for me until a time when I could understand them. ~ Maria Nhambu

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

My autobiography is one of the truest, most frankly written books ever published in the western hemisphere. ~ Kola Boof

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. ~ V.S. Naipaul

What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening - all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke. ~ Bob Dylan

I've already spent ten years of my life apologizing for that band. As their manager, that's all I really did. Apologize. For years afterward I'd walk into a hotel lobby and the receptionist would call to me, 'Mr. McGhee.' And I'd run up and drop to my knees and say, 'Oh, Jesus, I'm really sorry.'
They'd look at me funny and say, 'No, nothing's wrong. You have a telephone call.'
And I'd breathe a sigh of relief and thank the good Lord above that I wasn't managing Mötley Crüe anymore.

~ Doc McGhee. ~ Motley Crue

I am also planning to leave a lot of things undone. Part of life's mystery depends on future possibilities, and mystery is an elusive quality which evaporates when sampled frequently, to be followed by boredom. For example, catching various types of fish is on my list of good things to do, but I would be reluctant to rush into it, even if i had the time. I want no part of destroying fishing as a mysterious sport. ~ Michael Collins

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.' ~ Kate Atkinson

Yes, I have two books that are about me: one of them I wrote, and the other one was written about me. One of my books, which is called 'Spying on Miss Muller,' is really about me even though it's a novel. My autobiography is called 'Once Upon a Time.' ~ Eve Bunting

A ball feels different off every player's racket-there are minute but concrete subtleties of force and spin. Now, hitting with her (Steffi Graf), I feel her subtleties. It's like touching her, though we're forty feet apart. Every forehand is foreplay. ~ Andre Agassi

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

I am constantly telling my own story to myself, and these days that's about all the narrative flow I can handle. ~ Andrew Clements

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

Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye. ~ Janet Frame

I have found out the hard way that the path from victim to victory hinges on one word…Choose. ~ Tam Hodge

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

I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story. ~ Beth Ditto

But mostly what we think of as the 'meaning' of life concerns the style of the private autobiography we each write and which records how we 'see' ourselves. Whether this autobiography reads as a narrative of progress in which difficulties are transcended, or is chaotic, is the test of whether one's life seems to be meaningful or not. Meaning is something we find, or fail to find, as we follow through this project. We can see how love figures here: love is a major theme, but how we see our experience of love depends upon our general thinking. If, for example, we work with extremely high expectations of love we impose a tragic style upon our self-perceptions: for our experience of love will always be seen under an aspect of failure - failure focused upon ourselves or others. Hence the more subtle our thinking about love, the more intelligently we discriminate ideals from reality, the more interesting our autobiography becomes. ~ John Armstrong

An autobiography is inherently incomplete unless the last page is written on the eve of the author's demise. ~ Dan Makaon

In the early 1830s the writer George Sand, a woman, had a man's overcoat and a pair of boots made for her so she could have the same pleasure - to walk the streets of Paris free to look at whatever she liked. In her autobiography she writes: "I can't express the pleasure my boots gave me ... With those little iron-shot heels, I was on solid pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world. And then, my clothes feared nothing. I ran out in every kind of weather, I came home at every sort of hour ... No one paid any attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise ... No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd. ~ Randon Billings Noble

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

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on. ~ Richard Hell

I was awarded 'Most Aggressive Rider of the Day', generally given to the most spectacular loser of the day. ~ David Millar

You must have me confused with myself ~ Michael Palmer

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

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end. ~ Charles Wright

This was when Geryon liked to plan his autobiography; in that blurred state, between awake and asleep. When too many intake values are open in the soul, like the terrestrial crust of the earth. ~ Anne Carson

Memoirs are often about difficult things in a person's life. In my situation, my story starts with about the stupidest, most immoral thing I've ever done, one with terrible consequences. ~ Piper Kerman

Andy Anderson has written an autobiography in pictures, a life on the water. Salt is an eloquent modern paean to the strength and beauty of the coastal waters he cares for at a time when that environment is in danger of disappearing. ~ Guy De La Valdene

All autobiography is self-indulgent. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life. ~ Salman Rushdie

Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please. ~ Katandra Jackson Nunnally

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die. ~ Fay Weldon