My Autobiography Quotes & Sayings
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I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.' — Tao Lin
People are more interested in reading bombastic ideas, whether they're positive or negative. Part of me has sort of lost interest in doing criticism because of that. I've always realized that criticism is basically autobiography. Obviously in my criticism, it's very clear that it's autobiography, but I think it's that way for everybody. — Chuck Klosterman
My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine. — Karrine Steffans
In 1994, to motivate me to complete my pilot's license, my good friend, Gregg Maryniak, gave me Charles Lindbergh's autobiography of his solo flight across the Atlantic. — Peter Diamandis
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
I'd been in New York for nearly eighteen months, now - though I still felt a transient, passing through, and that this apartment, this address, my job and my salary were very temporary aspects of my autobiography and whatever significance this sojourn would have in any retrospective view was impossible to discern. — William Boyd
I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary. — Pablo Picasso
Mary Welland was certainly lovely. She was gentle and kind. She remained my friend all the time I was in hospital. But there is a world of difference falling in love with a voice and remaining in love with a person you can see. From the moment I opened my eyes, Mary became a human instead of a dream and my passion evaporated. — Roald Dahl
Nd songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. — Bob Dylan
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
I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places. — Kelly Cherry
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
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
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
This sounds like my autobiography, but I thought this would be a good time to sound off about myself, as I think that I have been silent too long about my views and opinions. — Bob Kane
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
Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray. — Oscar Wilde
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
When I find that I am more conscious, it's because I'm in tune with a higher reality. When I'm less conscious, it's because I've cut off that entunement to some extent. Maybe through drinking, through anger, through whatever. And I realized then that God has to be an infinite consciousness, and that I had to be an expression of that consciousness. And that the goal of life then must be to become more and more in tune with that consciousness. And I decided to give my life to God. And around that time, to make a long story short, I found Autobiography of a Yogi. — Goswami Kriyananda
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
Autobiography in Five Short Chapters Chapter I: I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. . . . I am helpless. It isn't my fault. It takes forever to find a way out. Chapter II: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I am in this same place. But it isn't my fault. It still takes a long time to get out. Chapter III: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in . . . it's a habit . . . but, my eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately. Chapter IV: I walk down the same street There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. Chapter V: I walk down another street. — Dan Millman
I don,t just want success for my self ,I want my success to benefit others .
Osman Gulum — Osman Gulum
When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read. — George Vecsey
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
When asked about her involvements, Joni most often refers to her work at JAF Ministries, including Wheels for the World - a program through which used wheelchairs are collected, refurbished, and hand-delivered, along with Bibles, to needy disabled people in developing nations. Chuck Colson has stated, "My friend Joni Eareckson Tada is one of God's choice servants of today." Philip Yancey has added, "Through her public example, Joni has done more to straighten out warped views of suffering than all the theologians put together. Her life is a triumph of healing - a healing of the spirit, the most difficult kind." You can read more about this remarkable woman in the twentieth-anniversary edition of her autobiography, titled Joni, published by Zondervan. — Joni Eareckson Tada
My autobiography was simply the story of my life. — Sidney Poitier
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
I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography. — Rick Springfield
None of this makes any sense."
"I'm beginning to think I should make that the title of my autobiography. — Rachel Hawkins
I wasn't allowed to use people's real names, such as my siblings and my children's father, but there's nothing fabricated or untrue in my autobiography. — Kola Boof
They asked me what I wanted to call my autobiography. I suggested: The Definitive Volume on the Finest Bloody Fast Bowler That Ever Drew Breath. — Fred Trueman
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
There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes. — William Trevor
I would like to read some books: I don't have time; I would like to continue working on my autobiography. — Gunther Schuller
My limitless ability to weave time and space does not make me a god - just a da-n good writer. — Edmund Alexander Sims
My 'Report to Greco' is not an autobiography. — Nikos Kazantzakis
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
One bright dusk, four, five, no, my God, six summers ago, I strolled along a Greenwich avenue of mature chestnuts and mock oranges in a state of grace. Those Regency residences number amount London's Costliest properties, but should you ever inherit one, dear Reader, sell it, don't live in it. Houses like these secrete some dark sorcery that transforms their owners into fruitcakes. One such victim, an ex-chief of Rhodesian polices, had, on the evening in question, written me a check as rotund as himself to edit and print his autobiography. My state of grace was thanks in part to this check, and in part to a 1983 Chablis from the Duruzoi vineyard, a magic potion that dissolves our myriad tragedies into mere misunderstandings. — David Mitchell
I'm twenty-seven years old, and somehow I feel like I want to become my angsty teenager self again, crawl into my closet, and listen to Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography album over and over again, because my parents are splitting up." I'm — Brittainy C. Cherry
My autobiography is one of the truest, most frankly written books ever published in the western hemisphere. — Kola Boof
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
The life of each and every one of us has been written. The crucifix is my autobiography. The blood is the ink. The nails the pen. The skin the parchment. On every line of that body I can trace my life. In the crown of thorns I can read my pride. In the hands that are dug with nails, I can read avarice and greed. In the flesh hanging from him like purple rags, I can read my lust. In feet that are fettered, I can find the times that I ran away and would not let him follow. Any sin that you can think of is written there. — Fulton J. Sheen
The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me. People — Kurt Vonnegut
This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back - I get glimpses of them in the mirror - and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography. — Mark Twain
Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me. — Stephen Fry
Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind. — Kilroy J. Oldster
My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives. — Diane Keaton
What Turning Forty Means to Me
I need to take my pants off as soon as I get home. I didn't used to have to do that. But now I do. — Tina Fey
It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life I used all my potential and all my talents and pushed myself to the limit. I could not have fought any harder. — Charlotte Eriksson
Freed from the thoughts of winning, I instantly play better. I stop thinking, start feeling. My shots become a half-second quicker, my decisions become the product of instinct rather than logic. — Andre Agassi
Let's face it, it's only called Scrubs because I'm saving 'Zach Braff' for my autobiography. — Zach Braff
I've been working on my autobiography, just pecking away in longhand. The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more detail you recall. It's not all pleasant! — Pat Morita
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
Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street.
Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say, My brother, the people wear doubt
thick as a cape
until we smile
and the cape falls. — Jacqueline Woodson
I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I'm in a state of utter confusion, don't know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I'm longing for something ... — Anne Frank
In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food. — Kate Christensen
Chronicle Books is a wonderful book company. I love how everything represents who I am. The Diva Rules! is not an autobiography in the sense that I am talking about my life but more about my journey as to where I am now. People told me I would never make it. I was staring in the face of adversity and did it anyway. I chronicle it through the years. It is about finding your strength. — Michelle Visage
Eventually my mother suffered a complete breakdown, and the court orders were finally signed. They took her to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo. My mother remained in the same hospital at Kalamazoo for about 26 years.
My last visit, when I knew I would never come to see her again-there-was in 1952. I was twenty-seven. My brother Philbert had told me that on his last visit, she had recognized him somewhat. "In spots" he said.
But she didn't recognize me at all.
She stared at me. She didn't know who I was.
Her mind, when I tried to talk, to reach her, was somewhere else. I asked, "Mama, do you know what day it is?"
She said, staring, "All the people have gone."
I can't describe how I felt. The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn't know me.
It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers."
-Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X
Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer.
The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red. I feel too greedy for colors to see them in carefully chosen words of poetry. — Azar Nafisi
I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that. — Nadine Gordimer
American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going. — Harvey Pekar
Yes, I have two books that are about me: one of them I wrote, and the other one was written about me. One of my books, which is called 'Spying on Miss Muller,' is really about me even though it's a novel. My autobiography is called 'Once Upon a Time.' — Eve Bunting
Everyone plagiarizes me. Ever since I wrote my autobiography. — Joe Biden
When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans. — Vera Brittain
I have a song I wrote called "Autobiography." I came from a very intense living situation, with having a parent on drugs and not having a lot of money. So I always want to talk about the real things. But I think 90 percent of my music, I want it to be 'feel-good music'. I'm already recording tracks for my album, but when it comes time to actually say, 'this is the album,' I may be in a completely different space than I'm in right now. — Nicki Minaj
It's a bit burned," my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something - a much-loved pet perhaps - salvaged from a tragic house fire. "But I think I scraped off most of the burned part," she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.
Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad. — Bill Bryson
I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with Truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments; it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. — Mahatma Gandhi
I got out of autobiography because my story is, I was famous, it was hard for me, I got into therapy. I had trouble with food, I got a nutritionist. There's no story there. — Courtney Thorne-Smith
After a short time I felt my truck began to move. The force of the water and the rising floodwaters lifted me and my truck off the road and through an orchard, bumping into trees, flood debris and who knows what else. — Steven C. Smith
'Masquerade' is the autobiography of Wyclef Jean. A lot of people know me through my work with Carlos Santana or Destiny's Child, winning all those Grammy Awards, but you do not know what is going on inside me. — Wyclef Jean
I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book.' — Dick Van Dyke
For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography — Pablo Picasso
Have you ever really wanted to be able to do something, but you came across a roadblock of some kind?
You have a difficult choice. I made that choice once and it changed my whole life, by giving me experiences I never would have had if I took the easy street and had not tried. — Deanie Humphrys-Dunne
One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth. — Alastair Campbell
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
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
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 have a children's book already out and my autobiography. — Della Reese
There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain. — Jeanette Winterson
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
The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it. — Marcel Duchamp
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
I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story. — Beth Ditto
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
My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. — W.E.B. Du Bois
My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story. — Valeria Luiselli
I caught a cold and didn't have time to work on my autobiography. — Julie Doucet
I usually balance out autobiography with goofy, amusing stuff to help keep the humour in my more serious work. — Jeffrey Brown
Eventually we discovered Bleeker Bob's in the West Village on 118 West Third Street. One time I was there I literally tried to rip the first Iron Maiden album out of the hands of a friend of mine. [...] I was having a tug-of-war with this guy over who was gonna buy it. [...] If I hadn't won, I would've gone home and gotten my shitty little tape recorder that you have to use two fingers to push play and record on, and I would've brought that to my friend's house and held it in front of a speaker to tape the record so I'd have something to listen to until I could find another copy. Yeah, it'd sound terrible but so what? We didn't know anything else. When I hear people say, 'I hate MP3s, they sound like shit,' I'm like, 'Fuck you, you hae no idea, you first-world-problem-having motherfucker. — Scott Ian
'My Life' is not an autobiography. It's just music. — Mary J. Blige
One day someone is going to read my autobiography and say Wow, what a horror novel — M.F. Moonzajer
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
'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject. — Kate Christensen
I hit adolescence only to discover my autobiography had already been written; plagiarized, in fact, by a man named J.D. Salinger who, in appropriating to himself my inner mass of pain and confusion, had given me the unlikely name of Holden Caulfield. — Stephen Metcalf
I am also planning to leave a lot of things undone. Part of life's mystery depends on future possibilities, and mystery is an elusive quality which evaporates when sampled frequently, to be followed by boredom. For example, catching various types of fish is on my list of good things to do, but I would be reluctant to rush into it, even if i had the time. I want no part of destroying fishing as a mysterious sport. — Michael Collins
If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. — Virginia Woolf
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
I employed my wife for three years to sit in the attic and type up my autobiography, 700 pages, organise everywhere I go. I'm paying the normal rate of tax on the money I take out for myself. — Ken Livingstone