Autobiographer Quotes & Sayings

I have this almost obsessive desire to whomever is close to me: I want to have a very intense, close, intimate relationship with them. — Susanne Bier

You can't let your past define your future. Once you get that figured out, you begin to understand the joy of living in the present. And the present is full of tiny gifts that we can only see when we stop looking behind and ahead of us. Sometimes, these gifts land right at our feet. Sometimes, it's our feet that carry us toward them, running at full-speed until our hearts nearly give out. Either way, never stop noticing them, and never stop wishing. — Cassia Leo

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities. — Glen Duncan

All things in God are spontaneous. — Gottfried Leibniz

People do not want what we have in our pockets half as much as they want what is in our hearts. If we combine both, intelligently, however, according to our means, we give wisely and well. — George Matthew Adams

I am used to wearing corsets. Even when I was first starting out it was either Shakespeare or Chekov. Everything that I was doing involved corsets. I guess I am just not destined to breathe that deeply. — Kate Beckinsale

Human life is just dangerous, in general. You know, waking up in the morning, you could get hit by a car. Wherever you go, you could choke on a fish bone and die. You never know. — Meital Dohan

God hears every quiet prayer on your heart. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge. — Erik Erikson

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred. — Salman Rushdie

The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much. — Russell Baker

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough. — Gustave Flaubert

Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right? ... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit. — Douglas Rushkoff

I could eat a boot, I think, if it were well boiled, with perhaps a dash of salt for flavoring. — Catherine Coulter

In moments of exhaustion, I think for some reason of writing an autobiography
proper work for tired artists
but every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life. Maybe, incidentally, this accounts for the paucity of women's autobiographies
they know better. — Arthur Miller

The autobiographer looks at life through the lens of his or her own life and really uses herself or himself as the jumping-off place to examine the social mores and the economic and political climates. In a way, the autobiography becomes history as well as the story of one person, for it becomes the story of a family or the story of the state or nation. — Maya Angelou

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists. — Donal Henahan

She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free. — Jonathan Franzen