Quotes About Autobiography

Very few people have actually had a chance to see the raw material that was going to comprise these three chapters [of Malcolm X Autobiography]. The missing political testament that should have been in the autobiography, but isn't.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

I don't want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.

I think anything that anyone writes thats any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.

In [Yogananda's] celebrated Autobiography of a Yogi, he offers a stunning account of the 'cosmic consciousness' reached on the upper levels of yogic practice, and numerous interesting perspectives on human nature from the yogic and Vedantic points of view.

I've written a lot of autobiography, which also involved listening.

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

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.

For better or worse, I seem to gravitate toward writing about something or someone else, then have my own self shove its way into that story. It seems insanely narcissistic. But I also think there's a particular effect that comes from using my autobiography in service to another story, as opposed to being the subject. I'm much more comfortable working in that mode. And I do think I have a persona or mood that I keep coming back to: self-conscious, self-critical, unsure. I write a lot about bodies, particularly male ones, usually as a point of emphasis for my insecurities about my own.

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?

I've always had a sneaking fondness for Martin Van Buren. He wrote his autobiography, you know, and never once mentioned his wife. Now that's what I call a mans man.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

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

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

'My Life' is not an autobiography. It's just music.

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.

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!

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.

I keep stacks of Autobiography of a Yogi around the house, and I give it out constantly to people. When people need 'regrooving,' I say read this, because it cuts to the heart of every religion.

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

Most people who read the autobiography perceive the narrative as a story that now millions of people know, and it was - it's a story of human transformation, the powerful epiphany, Malcolm's X journey to Mecca, his renunciation of the Nation of Islam's racial separatism, his embrace of universal humanity, of humanism that was articulated through Sunni Islam. Well, that's the story everybody knows.

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 . . .

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.

If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I'm sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don't do that, I've hamstrung the melody.

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

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

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.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer and inner universe photographed upon one little life's consciousness. For does not the whole world, seen and unseen, go to the making up of every human being?