Autobiography Quotes - Page 6

• 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.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Jan Phillips

  Who We Are, Way

  5 Copy quote

• [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

  55 Copy quote

• Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.

  Gelett Burgess

  Philosophy, Yoga, Inspiration

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

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Elia Kazan

  Writing, People, Buried

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story.

  Beth Ditto

  Paris, Stories, Want

  4 Copy quote

• For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'

  Arnold Schwarzenegger

  Writing, Years

  4 Copy quote