Autobiography Quotes - Page 5

• It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

  Philip Roth

  Ideas, History, Stories

  Philip Roth (1989). “The facts: a novelist's autobiography”, Vintage

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• My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan's life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Matter, Dirt, Kind

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

  John Berger

  Orphan, Form

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.765, Vintage

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• The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

  Groucho Marx

  Funny, Witty, Liars

  Groucho Marx (2009). “Groucho And Me”, p.28, Da Capo Press

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• This sounds like my autobiography, but I thought this would be a good time to sound off about myself, as I think that I have been silent too long about my views and opinions.

  Bob Kane

  Thinking, Views, Long

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• The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.

  Eric Hoffer

  Disappointment, Empty Life, Achievement

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

  Fawn M. Brodie

  Memories, Past, Men

  "No Man Knows My History". Book by Fawn M. Brodie, Ch. 19, 1945.

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• I was trying to write an autobiography using prints and patterns that reference emotional, psychological, and personal development in my work, as a person growing up, figuring out who I was. I used fabrics to stand in for occurrences.

  Jim Hodges

  Growing Up, Writing, Emotional

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• Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.

  Jane Smiley

  Writing, People, Interesting

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• Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

  Bernard Malamud

  Book, Would Be, Matter

  BERNARD MALAMUD (1979). “DUBLIN'S LIVES”

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• I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years.

  Gunter Grass

  Writing, Years, One Day

  "It Was Always on My Mind". Interview with Ulrich Wickert, www.spiegel.de. August 21, 2006.

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• My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.

  Karrine Steffans

  Grandfather, Mines, Died

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• Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies.

  Elia Kazan

  Writing, People, Buried

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

  Christian, Character, Men

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.325, Vintage

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• 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

  Writing, Character, Novelists

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Desire, Records, Stones

  Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.

  Groucho Marx

  Writing, Would Be

  Groucho Marx (2008). “Memoirs Of A Mangy Lover”, p.213, Da Capo Press

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• I've always had a sneaking fondness for Martin Van Buren. He wrote his autobiography, you know, and never once mentioned his wife. Now that's what I call a mans man.

  Cleveland Amory

  Men, Wife, Vans

  Cleveland Amory (1980). “The trouble with nowadays: a curmudgeon strikes back”, G K Hall & Co

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• In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

  Jonathan Raban

  Moving, Cities, Clothes

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.40, Pan Macmillan

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• 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

  Reading, Light, Important

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• Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.

  Gelett Burgess

  Philosophy, Yoga, Inspiration

  Gelett Burgess (1937). “Look Eleven Years Younger”

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• I won't ever direct a film. And I certainly won't write an autobiography. Only self-obsessed people want to write or talk about themselves!

  Kajol

  Writing, Self, People

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• 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

  Talking, People, Literature

  "John Cleese and The Key to Comedy". Interview with Devon Ivie, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 11, 2014.

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• If I ever write an autobiography about teaching meditation in the West, I'll call it "Pissing In the Wind - Teaching Buddhism in America".

  Frederick Lenz

  Teaching, Writing, Buddhism

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