Popular quotes about Autobiography! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.
Carolyn WellsReminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
Walter BenjaminLiterary lineage is part of your autobiography. The authors are the literary base, the image base, the character base that you bring into your civilian work. Same with film, architecture, music, sports. That's one tributary of the autobiography.
David BiespielI don't want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.
Stephen HawkingLook, I really do not care about you. What I care about is the worlds that you bear witness to. You are nothing more than a dog with a video camera strapped on its back. As you walk the streets looking for a place to mate or piss or eat, the camera is on and we will see the world because of you... You carry the camera and we enjoy the world. (On images as autobiography)
Michael LesyChronicle 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 VisageI write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.
Rick SpringfieldRic Flair was so big I heard about him. I've read his autobiography and all that. He's huge.
Bill BurrTo 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 GrantAn autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.
Claud CockburnThere'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 WintersonBiography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?
Henry David ThoreauAn 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.
Oscar WildeI think that today's books, in which every quote, every conversation, is taken from a memoir, an autobiography, an interview, or what-have-you, are much more convincing.
Russell FreedmanMy films have always had an element of immediate autobiography, in that I shoot any particular scene according to the mood I'm in that day, according to the little daily experiences I've had and am having - but I don't tell what has happened to me. I would like to do something more strictly autobiographical, but perhaps I never will, because it isn't interesting enough.
Michelangelo AntonioniI always call Billy Elliot a fantasy autobiography because I never wanted to be a dancer, but I got a lot of stick from the other kids about wanting to be a writer and being interested in drama.
Lee HallWhen you first start off, I know singers who have only been in the business just a short amount of time, and they've already written their autobiography. I didn't want to write it too soon. I wanted to live a while and write about things that I felt were important to me - growing up in Wales, and the characters that I met and listened to.
Tom Jonesbiography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.
Linda SimonSomebody 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 MurdochThey 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 TruemanI always think about Katharine Graham - she was the publisher of The Washington Post. In her autobiography she talks about the way her parents met. Her father was, I think, in New York just walking by on his way home and looked into a store and saw the lady that became his wife. It was just pure luck. And she said that it once again reminds her of the role that luck and chance play in our life. I really believe that, too.
Owen WilsonWriting 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