Autobiography Quotes - Page 10

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

  Berenice Bejo

  Gloria, Wanted, Knows

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

  Pablo Picasso

  Writing, People, Diaries

  21 Copy quote

• Autobiography is the most fascinating thing you can do because you get to touch the human condition. And in the end, what else is there? To me, it's the ultimate affirmation of life, and a miracle of this transient, extremely fragile organism. To celebrate that, I think, is a noble thing to do.

  Jim Dine

  Thinking, Miracle, Noble

  7 Copy quote

• They asked me what I wanted to call my autobiography. I suggested: The Definitive Volume on the Finest Bloody Fast Bowler That Ever Drew Breath.

  Fred Trueman

  Finest, Volume, Bowlers

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Interim, Reports

  4 Copy quote

• An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

  Doris Lessing

  Interim, Reports

  4 Copy quote

• The difference between America and England is that the English think 100 miles is a long distance and the Americans think 100 years is a long time. The difference between an autobiography and an unauthorized biography is like the difference between an account of your life written by your mother and one written by your mother-in-law.

  Marilyn vos Savant

  Mother, Distance, Thinking

  11 Copy quote

• The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.

  Patricia Hampl

  Real, Self, Tools

  4 Copy quote

• The life of each and every one of us has been written. The crucifix is my autobiography. The blood is the ink. The nails the pen. The skin the parchment. On every line of that body I can trace my life. In the crown of thorns I can read my pride. In the hands that are dug with nails, I can read avarice and greed. In the flesh hanging from him like purple rags, I can read my lust. In feet that are fettered, I can find the times that I ran away and would not let him follow. Any sin that you can think of is written there.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Pride, Thinking, Blood

  39 Copy quote

• A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Perception, Narrative

  7 Copy quote

• What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

  Francis Spufford

  Book, Inward, Shapes

  4 Copy quote

• The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Ideas, People, Important

  6 Copy quote

• There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

  Jeanette Winterson

  Art, Lying

  Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies : a Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Vintage Canada

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• This gave me occasion to observe, that when Men are employ'd they are best contented. For on the Days they work'd they were good-natur'd and chearful; and with the consciousness of having done a good Days work they spent the Evenings jollily; but on the idle Days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, finding fault with their Pork, the Bread, and in continual ill-humour. (Autobiography, 1771)

  Benjamin Franklin

  Good Day, Men, Pork

  Benjamin Franklin (1986). “The Autobiography and Other Writings”, p.170, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Running, Art

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Story of a Fashionable Young Man Who Sells His Soul for Eternal Youth and Beauty (Beloved Books Edition)”, p.17, Lulu Press, Inc

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.

  Rick Springfield

  Song, Writing, Truthful

  "Rick Springfield on His Sex Addiction, Depression and Attempted Suicide". Interview with Jeanne Wolf, parade.com. October 15, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Real, Believe, Writing

  Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Weight”, Canongate Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

  Arthur Golden

  Hands, Long, Missing

  "Memoirs of a Geisha". Book by Arthur Golden, September 27, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• All autobiography is fiction.

  Sandra Tsing Loh

  Crafts, Fiction

  6 Copy quote

• I hit adolescence only to discover my autobiography had already been written; plagiarized, in fact, by a man named J.D. Salinger who, in appropriating to himself my inner mass of pain and confusion, had given me the unlikely name of Holden Caulfield.

  Stephen Metcalf

  Pain, Men, Names

  6 Copy quote

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

  Claud Cockburn

  Book, Opportunity, Giving

  Claud Cockburn (1960). “Crossing the Line: Being the Second Volume of Autobiography”, Macgibbon & Kee

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Sam Ewing

  Believe, Past, Changed

  7 Copy quote

• To write an autobiography, you've got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible, without embarrassing anyone.

  Cary Grant

  Writing, People, World

  Nancy Lynn Nelson, Cary Grant (1991). “Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best”, William Morrow & Company

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• According to Colonel Ely Garrison, in his autobiography and according to the United States Naval Secret Service Report on Paul Warburg, the Russian Revolution had been
  financed by the Rothschilds and Warburgs, with a member of the Warburg family carrying the actual funds used by Lenin and Trotsky in Stockholm in 1918.

  Eustace Mullins

  Secret, United States, Revolution

  Eustace Clarence Mullins (2013). “The Study of The Federal Reserve and Its Secrets”, p.108, Simon and Schuster

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• A reflection of my feelings about the space program is found in a quotation from Charles A. Lindbergh's "Autobiography of Values." It reads, "Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes."

  Robert Wise

  Reflection, Space, Feelings

  4 Copy quote