Best Autobiography Quotes & Sayings

Autobiography is a precious broken vase pieced painstakingly together still showing the chips and cracks. It is a broken truth revealing snapshots of a cracked and chipped life pieced pieced painstakingly together. — Chloe Thurlow

When things go really wrong just imagine how interesting it will be as a chapter in your autobiography. — Gary Edward Gedall

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

In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting. — Craig Raine

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

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

If you do not want to explore an egoism you should not read autobiography. — H.G.Wells

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

My worse date ever?" I asked. "I don't know. I'm always amazed when the other person doesn't ask you anything about yourself. This one date - once the autobiography started, it wouldn't stop. I actually sat there, thinking, Wow, you're not going to ask me a single question, are you? And sure enough. Ten minutes. Thirty minutes. An hour. Only one subject. And it wasn't me." "So, what did you do?" you asked. "I just started counting. Like sheep. And when the waiter asked if we wanted to have dessert, my date started to order, and I interrupted and said I had promised a friend to walk his dog. What about you? — David Levithan

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does? — Phyllis Rose

This gave me occasion to observe, that when Men are employ'd they are best contented. For on the Days they work'd they were good-natur'd and chearful; and with the consciousness of having done a good Days work they spent the Evenings jollily; but on the idle Days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, finding fault with their Pork, the Bread, and in continual ill-humour. (Autobiography, 1771) — Benjamin Franklin

After reading Eminem's autobiography, which I did because I'm so interested in him as an artist, I respect him a lot. Even though he seems angry and mad, he's had to fight so many demons in his life. — Taryn Manning

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. — V.S. Naipaul

I was raised to farm work. — Abraham Lincoln

The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up. — Jack Dee

Story , finally, is humanity 's autobiography . — Lloyd Alexander

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

Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life. — Robert Adams

We distance ourselves for protection,
Wear scarves when it's cold.
What seems most outlandish in our autobiography
Is what really happened. — Steve Abbott

If it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography - and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation - then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant. — Joseph Conrad

Gardens are a form of autobiography. — Sydney Eddison

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

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. — Roald Dahl

The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today ... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow"
"Autobiography of an Historian", An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949). — G. M. Trevelyan

I'm a Democrat voting for Bush, even though on economic issues, from taxes to government regulation, I'm not happy with the Republican positions. But we're at war, and electing a president who is committed to losing it seems to be the most foolish thing we could do. Personal honesty is also important to me, and Kerry is obviously not in the running on that point, given that he can't keep track of the facts in his own autobiography. — Orson Scott Card

Sarah (Winnemucca) is best known for her 1883 autobiography, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Theirs Claims, the first memoir writen and published by a Native American woman. Her story begins; 'I was born somewhere near 1844, but am not sure of the precise time. I was a very small child when the first white people came to our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued to do so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming. — Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction. — Dinaw Mengestu

Expensive illogicalities and inefficiencies do not worry the monsters of American bureaucracy, and the taxpayers are enthusiastic and eager to spend fortunes in the name of fighting crime. Prison places cost the US taxpayer more than university places. The American belief that prisons are the best way to combat crime has led to an incarceration rate that is at least five times that of almost any industrialised nation. Overcrowding is endemic. Conditions are appalling, varying from windowless, sensory-deprived isolation to barren futile brutality. — Howard Marks

Y father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me. The town he lived in and the town I lived in were not the same. — Bob Dylan

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best. — Raymond Carver

Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils. — Rick Barnett

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood. — Robert Pinsky

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts - manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story. — Mark Twain

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

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning. — Philip Roth

Mary [Tyler Moore] was absolutely brilliant ... She is a fabulous actress. She can do anything. — Gavin MacLeod

9/11/01
Gina:
Especially today, with the enormity of current events, I want to convey to you again, how much you mean to me and how proud I am to be your husband. The hard work that you are engaged in right now is exhausting, invisible and largely thankless in the short term.
But honey, please know that buried at the core of this tedium is the most noble and important work in the world- God's work; the fruits of which you and I will be lucky enough to enjoy as we grow old together. Watching these little guys grow into men is a privilege that I am proud to share with you, and the perfect fulfillment of our marriage bonds.
You are a great mom.
You are a great wife.
You are my best friend.
You are very pretty.
Happy Birthday.

-Matt — Michael Spehn

Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles. — Ice Cube

Autobiography of a Yogi is justifiably celebrated as one of the most entertaining and enlightening spiritual books ever written. — Tom Butler-Bowdon

It was her smile that took me captive the day we met, and never once let me go. There was an authentic quality to her smile that made people stop and look; a basic human truth that seemed to emanate from deep within her and naturally find its way upward and out. Like the magma flow from Vesuvius, there was simply no stopping Cathy's smile. It could freeze people where they stood and hold them there, sometimes forever.
That's what happened to me anyway. — Michael Spehn

Sometimes, the way around prejudice is education. — Liza Mundy

What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography. — Randy Alcorn

I think I might be the very first person who initiated the AutoQuotery (as in, AutoBiography) practice! — Ibrahim Ibrahim

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

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

Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to invent a fictive self. — Nicholas Delbanco

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

Someday, I want to write an unauthorized autobiography of myself. — David McMullen-Sullivan

There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography. — Paul Valery

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

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

Love and respect are above any law — Uri Jerzy Nachimson