Quotes & Sayings About Autobiographies

I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time. — Annette Bening

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time. — Harold Acton

There is no public record of Barack Obama's (or Stanley Ann Dunham's) being in the CIA. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn't. The reader may consider the information and, based on background, life experiences, and ability to keep an open mind, may come to either conclusion.
But any explanation of why Barack Obama would not have mentioned a word of his Most Excellent Pakistani Adventure in either of his two autobiographies requires a conspiracy theory that might cast doubt on either the sanity or the sincerity fothe person proposing it. — Mondo Frazier

An Autobiography is the truest of all books,for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell (though I didn't use that figure)
the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences. — Mark Twain

I don't want to know about my biggest idols. I don't want to read their autobiographies, I don't want to find out what they're really like. — Meg White

All autobiographies are alibi-ographies. — Clare Boothe Luce

The surroundings householders crave are glorified autobiographies ghost-written by willing architects and interior designers who, like their clients, want to show off. — T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings

What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great. — Miles Franklin

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies. — Matthew McGrory

All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies. — George Bernard Shaw

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies. — Steven Pinker

I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life. — Ranbir Kapoor

Sometimes, with autobiographies, it turns into a bit of score-settling. And looking back, I don't feel the way I did then, and you kind of grow up and let it go behind you. — Marc Almond

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

I believe artists should be able to step into other people's situations, contexts and cultures and work from there. If artists don't have that freedom, then, as someone has said, are we all writing our autobiographies? — Uwem Akpan

I haven't read any of the autobiographies about me. — Elizabeth Taylor

I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it. — Eddie Trunk

The Internet is dumb. The Internet, with all its access to brain research, anthropology journals, social studies networks, and biographies and autobiographies, can't begin to map the complexity of our lives, or how we each affect others. — Dee Williams

Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer. — Jeff Dunham

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age. — Roberto Bolano

He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. — Clive Barker

Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie. — Gary Kemp

I love books and the latest autobiographies. I'm a Gemini and love being with people, but then again, I love my own company, which is when I read most. — Cilla Black

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

Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies. — Gelett Burgess

I went to Hollywood. I put the action in Hollywood. I watched a lot of movies, maybe 100 or something close to that. I have tons of DVDs now at home. I don't know what to do with them because they're not useful anymore. My kids never watched them. I read a lot of autobiographies, listened to a lot of music by classical era composers like Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman and Leonard Bernstein. I listened to only that kind of music the entire time I was writing, even at home. — Michel Hazanavicius

One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely. — Lev Shestov

I'm always embarrassed by those rugby player autobiographies which get written by journalists. — Peter Jackson

Aren't autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don't we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am. — Frederick Weisel

Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself. — Paul Stanley

I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one! — Anita Pallenberg

I trained as a librarian, and I run a bookstore. Fucking right I can use a gun ... if I have to engage somebody between the counter and the door, only the political autobiographies are in danger and who gives a fuck about those? — Jonathan L. Howard

[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

Of my private life I have nothing to say: it does not concern others. I have always had little liking for autobiographies and have no interest in anyone's affairs. History proper and novels hold no attractions for me except insofar as, I can discern there, as within our immortal Revolution, the adventures of the mind. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

I think books, novels and autobiographies have a power to touch people far more personally than films do, so there's a bit more of a responsibility when you then dramatise it. — Robert Sheehan

I don't want to get into autobiographies; I don't want to talk about myself. — Rollie Fingers

I read the book [My Life by Bill Clinton] completely. And I think it compares very favorably with Ulysses S. Grant's gold standard of presidential autobiographies. — Dan Rather

Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two. — Ellery Sedgwick

Read to your children all of the time
Novels and nursery rhymes
Autobiographies, even the newspaper
It doesn't mater; it's quality time
Because once upon a time
We grew up on stories in the voices in which they were told
We need words to hold us and the world to behold us
For us to truly know our souls — Taylor Mali

Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies. — Elia Kazan

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction . — A.S. Byatt

Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don't achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.

We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel - as we'll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads. — Matthew Syed

Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives. — Marilyn Ferguson

Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things. — Paul Theroux

I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc. — George Seaton

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

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. — John Ruskin

In the mid-nineties, I quit my job as a senior feature writer at 'The Mail' on Sunday in the U.K. and became a 'ghost writer,' collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, soldiers and sporting legends who needed help in penning their autobiographies. — Michael Robotham

The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up. — Paul Evdokimov

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times. — Alan Furst

Books seem the most potent source: each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I'm hoovering up lives at a ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person by sundown. — Caitlin Moran

wonder why I keep writing these chapter introductions. I spend a lot of time in these stories not actually writing these stories. There must be something to it. Something I don't want to admit. These are another delay. To keep myself from writing the inevitable. As long as I'm waxing fanciful about bunnies and bazookas, I don't have to make progress toward the ending. I don't want to get there. Despite claiming I'm writing these autobiographies to set the story straight, I don't actually want to do it. Deep down, I'd rather think of myself as a hero. Of course, I'm probably too much of a coward to include this section in the book. — Brandon Sanderson

I watched a lot of drunk players, too, I learned from the autobiographies published after they had retired. — Nick Hornby

In the Alco Ward a dispute had broken out over plagiarism. Incidentally, when I arrived there for the first time I did not have the slightest notion that I was crossing the threshold of a creative writing program, that I was entering a community of people of the pen, of writers who were incessantly creating their alcoholic autobiographies, recording their innermost feeling in cheap sixty-page notebooks that were called emotional journals, laboriously assembling their drunkard's confessions. — Jerzy Pilch

I love memoirs and autobiographies in general. — Brett Davern

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

If you want to turn a vision into reality, you have to give 100% and never stop believing in your dream. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she'd seen them, touched them. She thought of the tattoos she'd seen: freak show exhibits some of them, others just shirtless laborers in the street with a message to their mothers pricked across their backs. It was not unknown, to write a book of blood. — Clive Barker

The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.
I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.

My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.
I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!

It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers. — Eskay Teel