Autobiography Quotes - Page 13

• Here is a quilted book about mathematical practice, each patch wonderfully prepared. Part invitation to number theory, part autobiography, part sociology of mathematical training, Mathematics without Apologies brings us into contemporary mathematics as a living, active inquiry by real people. Anyone wanting a varied, cultured, and penetrating view of today's mathematics could find no better place to engage.

  Peter Galison

  Real, Book, Apology

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• All autobiographies are alibi-ographies.

  Clare Boothe Luce

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• Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Humanity, Stories

  "The Grammar of Story". Celebrating Children's Books: Essays on Children's Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland, 1981.

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• THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY is ostensibly an autobiography but in truth it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig’s glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna’s golden age, in which he grew up and flourished.

  Ronald Harwood

  Yesterday, Age, Bells

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• Autobiography of a Yogi is justifiably celebrated as one of the most entertaining and enlightening spiritual books ever written.

  Tom Butler-Bowdon

  Spiritual, Book, Enlightening

  Tom Butler-Bowdon (2010). “50 Spiritual Classics: Timeless Wisdom From 50 Great Books of Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose”, p.301, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

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• One's life story cannot be told with complete veracity. A true autobiography would have to be written in states of mind, emotions, heartbeats, smiles and tears; not in months and years, or physical events. Life is marked off on the soul by feelings, not by dates.

  Helen Keller

  Years, Soul, Feelings

  Helen Keller, Kim E. Nielsen (2005). “Helen Keller: Selected Writings”, p.142, NYU Press

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• I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

  Sloane Crosley

  Thinking, Insane, Sound

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• A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer and inner universe photographed upon one little life's consciousness. For does not the whole world, seen and unseen, go to the making up of every human being?

  Lucy Larcom

  Unseen, Doe, World

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• An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Lying, Deceit, Fiction

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “The Writer and the World: Essays”, p.225, Pan Macmillan

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• 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

  Differences, Trying, Stories

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• Dammit, Dresden, if you want to know about me, wait for the autobiography like everyone else.

  Jim Butcher

  Waiting, Want, Dresden

  Jim Butcher (2004). “Blood Rites: Book six of The Dresden Files”, p.220, Penguin

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• To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.

  C. S. Lewis

  Lying, Thinking, Giving

  C.S. Lewis (2005). “A Preface to Paradise Lost”, p.9, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• Ive never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.

  James Frey

  Writing, Interest, Accurate

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• The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other hand, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our own lives how impossible that is.

  Richard Lewontin

  Hands, Issues, People

  "Sex, Lies, and Social Science". The New York Review of Books, www.nybooks.com. April 20, 1995.

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• Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

  Alberto Moravia

  Real, Liars, Writing

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• But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.

  Katherine Boo

  Writing, People, Citizens

  "Reporting Poverty". Interview with Emily Brennan, www.guernicamag.com. September 4, 2012.

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• Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

  Augusto Roa Bastos

  Speak, Relate, Loses

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• Johnny Ramone's autobiography is a no holds barred, straight-forward book written in a no-nonsense style that is Johnny personified. His story is written in his own actual words, so the reader gets an insight into what made him the unique, charismatic and exciting individual that he was. It also gives a great view of The Ramones from Johnny's perspective.

  Tommy Ramone

  Book, Unique, Views

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• the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

  Erica Jong

  Artist, Greatest Treasure, Gold

  Erica Jong (2007). “What Do Women Want?: Essays by Erica Jong”, p.53, Penguin

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• (Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography - which refutes the first - makes worse the mess he has made.

  George Will

  Memories, Natural Talent, Dna

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• You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.

  Kate Millett

  America, Self, Paper

  Kate Millett (2000). “Flying”, p.83, University of Illinois Press

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• ... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Fiction, Bounds

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• After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom.

  Rita Levi-Montalcini

  Spring, Home, Army

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• I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Successful, Lectures, Materials

  Abraham Lincoln (2008). “Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln(1832-1865) (EasyRead Super Large 20pt Edition)”, p.49, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• I was raised to farm work.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Raised, Farms

  Abraham Lincoln (1989). “Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 2: 1859-1865: Library of America #46”, p.107, Library of America

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