Quotes About Autobiography

I love to read autobiographies. [What is your favorite autobiography?] the autobiography of Coach John Wooden. Everybody has a struggle so it's about seeing how they overcome it and be the best they can.

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

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.

The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.

For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

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.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other hand, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our own lives how impossible that is.

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.

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.

Photos are our autobiography, a way of telling who we are.

Every ist writes his own autobiography.

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!

I was working within a figurative representational framework, and there was a sense of reading the painting as a transparency, or truth, or autobiography, which I think is partially the burden of artists of color - or women, or anybody who is representing a so-called minority position. Are you actually telling a true story, or your own story? You don't just get to tell a story. The readings of the work didn't necessarily conform to my own understanding of mythology, where violence and eroticism and the body and all of these different forms coexist all the time.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

I believe there's only one autobiography you can do.

The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

When 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.

I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography.

If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.

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.

I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

Ive never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.