Autobiography Quotes - Page 6

• I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.

  Clifton Fadiman

  Writing, Choices, Poor

  Clifton Fadiman (1955). “Party of One: The Selectd Writings of Clifton Fadiman”

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• One senses, in all autobiography, a straining toward perfection, perfection of a kind that connects the individual with a cosmic pattern which, because it is perfect in itself, verifies that individuals own potential perfection.

  Roger Rosenblatt

  Perfect, Patterns, Kind

  Roger Rosenblatt (1994). “The Man in the Water: Essays and Stories”, Random House

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• Photos are our autobiography, a way of telling who we are.

  Jan Phillips

  Who We Are, Way

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• Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

  Steven Pinker

  Writing, People, Creative

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.361, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Reading any collection of a man's quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won't go away hungry, but it's not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal.

  Christopher Buckley

  Reading, Men, Giving

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• The way I would live my life is: never do something in real life that I would not want to write about in my Autobiography.

  Siddharth Katragadda

  Real, Writing, Way

  "Dark Rooms: A Saga". Book by Siddharth Katragadda, 2001.

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• [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

  Rags, Riches, Ifs

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• When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

  Georges Bernanos

  Writing, Self, Inner Strength

  Georges Bernanos, Rémy Rougeau (2002). “The Diary of a Country Priest”, p.8, Da Capo Press

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• autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.

  George Eliot

  Mistake, Men, World

  George Eliot (1860). “Life and Letters”, p.654

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• One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.

  Alastair Campbell

  Country, Powerful, Men

  "The Bill Clinton I knew" by Alastair Campbell, www.theguardian.com. June 26, 2004.

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• Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

  W. P. Kinsella

  Writing, People, Interesting

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• 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

  Dream, Father, Book

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.464, Pan Macmillan

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• In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky

  Jean Genet

  Dark, Cells, Sky

  Jean Genet (1987). “Our Lady of the Flowers”, p.70, Grove Press

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• Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.

  Randall Jarrell

  Country, Confused, Passion

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The Development of Yeats's Sense of Reality" (p. 89), 1980.

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• A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.

  Mary Antin

  Men, Unfinished Work, Yesterday

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

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• Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I'd try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, 'This is the end.' I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.

  Rupert Murdoch

  Couple, Writing, Next Week

  "Rupert Murdoch Has Potential". www.esquire.com. September 11, 2008.

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• One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

  Carlos Fuentes

  Writing, Biographies, Like You

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• when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are . Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least.

  Mark Twain

  Hurt, Doe, Jam

  Mark Twain (2010). “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition”, p.8, Univ of California Press

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• an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

  Mark Twain

  Book, Cat, Dust

  Mark Twain (2016). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”, p.55, Chartwell

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• I employed my wife for three years to sit in the attic and type up my autobiography, 700 pages, organise everywhere I go. I'm paying the normal rate of tax on the money I take out for myself.

  Ken Livingstone

  Years, Wife, Three

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• The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.

  Agatha Christie

  Writing, Sooner Or Later, Has Beens

  Agatha Christie (2010). “An Autobiography”, p.10, HarperCollins UK

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• I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Jealous, Writing, Privacy

  Nadine Gordimer (1995). “Writing and Being”, p.115, Harvard University Press

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• To start writing about your life is, from one standpoint, to stop living it. You must avoid adventures today so as to make time for registering those of yesterday.

  Ned Rorem

  Writing, Adventure, Yesterday

  Ned Rorem (2013). “The Later Diaries of Ned Rorem: 1961–1972”, p.97, Open Road Media

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• My approach to the work is the same, whether I had the lead or a supporting role. I consider myself a character actor in the true sense of the word. Unless I'm doing my autobiography, I'm playing a character.

  Ving Rhames

  Character, Roles, Actors

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

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• to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

  P. D. James

  Memories, Past, Looks

  P. D. James (2011). “Time to Be in Earnest”, p.15, Faber & Faber

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