Autobiography Quotes - Page 15

• biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.

  Linda Simon

  Biographies, Biographers, Written

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• Death is the advertisement, at the end of an autobiography, wherein people discover its virtues.

  Myrtle Reed

  Death, People, Virtue

  Myrtle Reed (2012). “The Spinster Book”, p.93, tredition

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• Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

  Robert Pinsky

  Notorious, Genre, Falsehood

  "How My Mind Writes Poems" by Robert Pinsky, bigthink.com.

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• the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Elements, Interpretation, Whole

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2010). “Mind of the Maker”, p.71, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Art, Men

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.14, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• 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

  Growing Up, Let It Go, Way

  Source: thequietus.com

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• A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.

  Mary Antin

  Bed, Confession, Death Bed

  Mary Antin (2013). “The Promised Land”, p.12, Courier Corporation

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• Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

  Bernard Berenson

  Writing, Humanity, Literature

  Bernard Berenson (1962). “The Bernard Berenson Treasury: A Selection from the Works, Unpublished Writings, Letters, Diaries, and Journals of the Most Celebrated Humanist and Art Historian of Our Times, 1887-1958”

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• If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

  Salman Rushdie

  Voice, Giving, Dumb

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• What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Nature, Phrases, Pursuit

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• 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

  Writing, Eye, Giving

  Janet Frame (1998). “The Complete Autobiography”, Womens PressLtd

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• there is no truly honest autobiography.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Honest

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (1931). “My story”, Farrar & Rinehart

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• Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.

  Jeff Dunham

  People, Biographies, Ghost

  TheCelebrityCafe.com interview, thecelebritycafe.com. November 23, 2011.

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• 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

  Writing, Spy, Nazi

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

  Oscar Wilde

  Philosophy, Real, Soul

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.365, University of Chicago Press

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• I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.

  Nick Hornby

  Girl, Book, Mean

  "High Fidelity". www.imdb.com. 2000.

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• Tell me about yourself, Miss Russel." I started to give him the obligatory response, first the demurral and then the reluctant flat autobiography, but some slight air of polite inattention in his manner stopped me. Instead, I found myself grinning at him. "Why don't you tell me about myself, Mr. Holmes?

  Laurie R. King

  Air, Giving, Missing

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• an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.

  Phyllis Rose

  Promise, Needs, Hearing

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• I was working within a figurative representational framework, and there was a sense of reading the painting as a transparency, or truth, or autobiography, which I think is partially the burden of artists of color - or women, or anybody who is representing a so-called minority position. Are you actually telling a true story, or your own story? You don't just get to tell a story. The readings of the work didn't necessarily conform to my own understanding of mythology, where violence and eroticism and the body and all of these different forms coexist all the time.

  Chitra Ganesh

  Reading, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Writing, Cutting, Childhood

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• 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

  Writing, Heart, Australia

  1925 Melodies and Memories, ch.1.

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• Twenty-two years ago Judge [then-Senator Stephen] Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure--a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Ambition, Two, Race

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• 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

  Wise, Smart, Self

  "A Pirate Looks at Fifty". Book by Jimmy Buffett, www.cnn.com. 1998.

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

  Miles Franklin

  Miles Franklin (2012). “My Career Goes Bung”, p.28, Allen & Unwin

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• Whenever I see an autobiography for sale in the book store i just flip to the about the author section. I'm like, "Done, next!"

  Demetri Martin

  Funny, Book, Humor

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