Quotes & Sayings About Autobiography Writing

12/18/89 Calvin asks Hobbes if he'll help him write a book. Calvin says this book will be like historical fiction. He's writing a fictional autobiography. He tells Hobbes it's the story of his life with a lot of parts completely made up. Hobbes asks why he'd want to make up his whole life. Calvin replies that in his book, he has a flame thrower. — Steve Kurtz

When I left the Senate in 1979, there were several publishers who had approached me about writing an autobiography, and I knew that politicians write books for many reasons, but at that time, I just thought I wasn't ready and my story wasn't over, and I knew I had a new life ahead of me. — Edward Brooke

There's something presumptuous in writing an autobiography, as if people's interest in your life is a given. — Simon Pegg

There is always some sleight of hand going on in writing autobiography. So much has to be left out, especially things that might hurt or dismay people. But in a novel one can say everything. The novel is often autobiography distilled and / or transcended. — May Sarton

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary. — Pablo Picasso

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is - an intense form of thought. — Don DeLillo

Telling our personal story constitutes an act of consciousness that defines the ethical lining of a person's constitution. Recounting personal stories promotes personal growth, spurs the performance of selfless deeds, and in doing so enhances the ability of the equitable eye of humanity to scroll rearward and forward. Every person must become familiar with our communal history of struggle, loss, redemption, and meaningfully contemplate the meaning behind our personal existence in order to draft a proper and prosperous future for succeeding generations. Accordingly, every person is responsible for sharing their story using the language of thought that best expresses their sanguine reminiscences. Without a record of pastimes, we will never know what were, what we now are, or what we might become by steadfastly and honorably struggling with mortal chores. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The brain writes the autobiography of our species at the conscious level. — David Brooks

I've been asked to write my autobiography and really they only want 8 years (1962-1970), and I keep saying it would be five volumes before I even got into the band! — Ringo Starr

Efore the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation series of books began to appear in 1979, the scientific autobiography was a largely unfamiliar genre. One recalls Cajal's extraordinary Recollections of My Life, translated into English in 1937, and the little gem of autobiography written by Charles Darwin for his grandchildren in 1876. One supposes that this form of scientific writing is scarce because busy scientists would rather continue to work on scientific problems than to indulge in a retrospective exercise using a writing style — Anonymous

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death. — Craig Briggs

Attempting to express a person's objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Former South Africa President Nelson Mandela announced Tuesday he will begin writing his autobiography. He spent 25 years in prison before being elected to public office. In America, we do it the other way around. — Argus Hamilton

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead. — Joseph Barbera

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote. — Jeffrey L. Staley

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography. — Richard Simmons

To write an autobiography, you've got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible, without embarrassing anyone. — Cary Grant

Every human being carries with them the stories of their ancestors, the story of their generation, and the rudiments of pliable clay to build future storylines that will shape their community of kindred souls. Storytelling unites us as a species and supplies texture to our lives. By listening to other people's stories and by sharing our personal story, we deftly weave the threads that compose the sacred hoop of the tribe. — Kilroy J. Oldster

But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, "I've got a wife and kids" is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar. The anonymous hotel room in a strange city ... — Paul Theroux

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on. — Richard Hell

Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye. — Janet Frame

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real. — Jeanette Winterson

I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject. — Clifton Fadiman

If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian. — Nellie Melba

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

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life's legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack. — Kilroy J. Oldster

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

Mom - the person most likely to write an autobiography and never mention herself. — Robert Breault

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

I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography. — June Foray

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing. — Robert Dessaix

Human souls enfold the elemental elements that we configure to provide our own distinctive explanation of what it means to be alive. By opening our hearts and minds, by engaging in intuitive self-exploration, by telling our life stories full of prejudices and mindboggling idiosyncrasies, and by listening to the multivariate stories of our brethren, we add a ray of light to the spiraling consciousness of humankind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things ... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music. — Paul Auster

Old Timer's Disease
The celebrity
with Alzheimer's
sued himself for writing his
unauthorized autobiography. — Beryl Dov

I realized going back and writing and explaining in details the difficulties I had lived actually became emotional again. It's like therapy but sometimes therapy can be painful. But it's part of life and part of the autobiography so I'll have to finish it sooner or later. — Jenni Rivera

Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted, far worse than an autobiography: and its rewards were greater than I expected. — Dick Francis

When I was first approached about doing an autobiography, I said, 'absolutely not.' But when I sat down, memories came pouring out. It wrote very quickly - I think there was an emotional impulse, because once I started in, the story itself carried me along. It was a very intense writing period and took a year and change to finish. — Julia Cameron

People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion.
When writing about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box. — Akira Kurosawa

When I was writing my autobiography, these songs came up from time to time which were important to me, and I realized that what they really represented was, they'd come from this age of shared music. — Greg Lake

The way I would live my life is: never do something in real life that I would not want to write about in my Autobiography. — Siddharth Katragadda

When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman. — Alessandra Stanley

Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it. — Anupam Kher

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,
but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility. — Katherine Paterson

Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world's consciousness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else. — Cary Grant

I was sort of on a mission with 'American Splendor.' I wanted to try to prove that comics could do things. I wanted to expand them beyond superheroes and talking animals. And I knew that was going to take a long time. But I just started writing an autobiography about my quotidian life. — Harvey Pekar

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity. — Bernard Berenson

I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that. — Nadine Gordimer

It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry down too close to your own time - it is safest to speak only vaguely of your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now do. I was born without teeth - and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest. But — Mark Twain

But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don't want to live in that world. — Katherine Boo

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

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

In writing the autobiography, I can really chuckle when I look at the songs. I was acting out the part. I saw myself as a victim. — Boy George

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography. — Steven Wright

Of course it's fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who've never met me, who don't know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he's just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was. — Michel Faber

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

The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later. — Agatha Christie

Our children are an integral component of our stories as we are of theirs and, therefore, each child acts as the knighted messengers to carry their forebears' stories into the future. To deprive our children of the narrative cells regarding the formation of the ozone layer that rims the atmosphere of our ancestors' saga and parental determination of selfhood is to deny them of the sacred right to claim the sanctity of their heritage. Accordingly, all wrinkled brow natives are chargeable with the sacrosanct obligation of telling their kith and kin the memorable story of the scenic days they spent as children of nature splashing about in their naked innocence in the brook of infinite time and space. We must scrupulous document our family's history as well as scrawl out our personal story. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I have a disease; I see language. — Roland Barthes

I am, as it were, the created creating - a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages. — Sol Luckman

I've never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography. — James Frey

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years. — Steve Martin

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography. — J.M. Coetzee

If I ever write an autobiography about teaching meditation in the West, I'll call it "Pissing In the Wind - Teaching Buddhism in America". — Frederick Lenz

I had a few people ask me if I might one day write my own autobiography. I just told them, 'It's already being written; through my books. — T.S. Wieland

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

These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important. — Virginia Woolf

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are. — Robert Penn Warren

The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography. — Theodor Haecker

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true. — Wallace Stegner

Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person's conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace. — Kilroy J. Oldster

If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction. — Shannon L. Alder

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject? — Yiyun Li

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

The trajectory of my writing has moved further and further away from autobiography. My first stories in Confessions of a Falling Woman worked familiar territory - places I had lived, people I knew, my life as an actor in New York - and many were prompted by or grounded in personal experience. — Debra Dean

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

Happy 3rd anniversary Navigating Life's Roadways!
This book is a charge and blessing from above.
Writing it has been on my radar for a while. — Deborah L. Parker

Hiring someone to write your autobiography is like hiring someone to take a bath for you — Mae West

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form. — John Berger

To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx. — Groucho Marx

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation — Kilroy J. Oldster