Autobiography Quotes - Page 5

• Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

  H. L. Mencken

  Interesting, Literature, World

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

  Elia Kazan

  Writing, People, Buried

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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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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• Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.

  Gelett Burgess

  Philosophy, Yoga, Inspiration

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

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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