Autobiography Quotes - Page 8

• I don't want to get into autobiographies, I don't want to talk about myself.

  Rollie Fingers

  Want

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• It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson's] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.

  Dorothy Parker

  Simple, Lakes, Effort

  New Yorker, 25 Feb. 1928

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• When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about

  Elias Canetti

  Writing, Pages, Should

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• I was elected a Captain of Volunteers--a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Volunteer, Captains, Pleasure

  Abraham Lincoln, Mario Matthew Cuomo, G. S. Boritt (2004). “Lincoln on Democracy”, p.50, Fordham Univ Press

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• I was born and have ever remaind [sic] in the most humble walks of life.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Humility, Humble, Born

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• It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.

  John Dos Passos

  Smart, Men, Thinking

  John Dos Passos (1969). “One man's initiation: 1917: a novel”

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• People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?
  A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge "what manner of person he is." I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal.

  James Boswell

  Heart, Kids, Men

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• [A]s a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal.

  James Boswell

  Character, Men, Mirrors

  James Boswell, John Wilson Crocker (1853). “Boswell's Life of Johnson: Including Their Tour to the Hebrides”, p.572

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• A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . .

  Erwin Chargaff

  Writing, Men, Literary Genre

  Erwin Chargaff (1978). “Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature”, p.61, Paul & Company Pub Consortium

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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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• It would just be a pamphlet. Three pages. The first page would be Drugs I Have Taken and then a list. The next page would be People I Have Slept With and then another list. Then the last page would be Famous People I Have Partied With and then another list. Because that's all people write in their autobiographies. Cut out all the bullshit and it's just a three-page pamphlet.

  Ryan Jarman

  Taken, Writing, Cutting

  "The Cribs' Ryan Jarman: 'This is the only job I can do ... McDonald's wouldn't employ me'". Interview With Tim Jonze, www.theguardian.com. February 27, 2013.

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• Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

  V. S. Pritchett

  School, Eye, Games

  "The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers" by Random House, (p. 95), 1980.

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• I found the best ideas usually came, not when one was actively striving for them, but when one was in a more relaxed state… I used to take long solitary walks on Sundays, during which I tended to review the current situation in a leisurely way. Such occasions often proved fruitful, even though (or perhaps, because) the primary purpose of the walk was relaxation and not research.

  Paul Dirac

  Sunday, Ideas, Long

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• I keep stacks of Autobiography of a Yogi around the house, and I give it out constantly to people. When people need 'regrooving,' I say read this, because it cuts to the heart of every religion.

  George Harrison

  Heart, Cutting, People

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• Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

  Clarence Darrow

  Dream, Imagination, Perspective

  Clarence Darrow (2015). “The Story of My Life”, p.13, Lulu.com

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• Siamese twins are interesting because they are the only people who can write a biography and an autobiography at the same time.

  Demetri Martin

  Writing, People, Interesting

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• I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Writing

  Source: urbanmoms.ca

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• In a novel there's not much autobiography. There are characters in transit. Naturally, I can project something of my experiences onto the characters, but they have their own autonomy, a personality that is often a mystery to me.

  Dacia Maraini

  Character, Personality, Mystery

  Source: wordswithoutborders.org

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• I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

  Paul Auster

  Winter, Thinking, Stories

  Time Out Interview, www.timeout.com.

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• Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Artistic, Strikes, Biographers

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• I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

  Brett Davern

  Memoir

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• My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

  Mia Farrow

  Father, Writing, Interesting

  "'I've always had a sense of the unworthiness of myself'". Interview With Gaby Wood, www.theguardian.com. January 28, 2006.

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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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• Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

  Lisel Mueller

  Writing, Facts, Subjects

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• Autobiography is mostly alibiography.

  Clare Boothe Luce

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