Quotes About Autobiography

Literary 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.

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

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.

Look, 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)

Because I didn't go to film school, I had a collection of books that were inspiring or taught me how to make movies, shorts with my friends back in Brooklyn, and one of those books was How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime which is Roger's autobiography. After reading that, I realized that oh my God, this guy is behind all my favorite Pam Grier movies. Oh my God, he made the Vincent Price Poe films that ran on television when I was little. He did Grand Theft Auto. He made Death Race 2000.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

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.

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.

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.

the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

(Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography - which refutes the first - makes worse the mess he has made.

Tell me about yourself, Miss Russel." I started to give him the obligatory response, first the demurral and then the reluctant flat autobiography, but some slight air of polite inattention in his manner stopped me. Instead, I found myself grinning at him. "Why don't you tell me about myself, Mr. Holmes?

Every ist writes his own autobiography.

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

The autobiographer looks at life through the lens of his or her own life and really uses herself or himself as the jumping-off place to examine the social mores and the economic and political climates. In a way, the autobiography becomes history as well as the story of one person, for it becomes the story of a family or the story of the state or nation.

An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

I had said before that I'd never write an autobiography because I've been around, and there's a lot that I've seen and heard that stays with me. That's just mine. I didn't want to do a kiss-and-tell, as some of my peers have.

Johnny Ramone's autobiography is a no holds barred, straight-forward book written in a no-nonsense style that is Johnny personified. His story is written in his own actual words, so the reader gets an insight into what made him the unique, charismatic and exciting individual that he was. It also gives a great view of The Ramones from Johnny's perspective.

I read Gloria Swanson's autobiography just because I wanted to know what it was like in the time.

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.

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.

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.

If I ever write an autobiography about teaching meditation in the West, I'll call it "Pissing In the Wind - Teaching Buddhism in America".

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

Siamese twins are interesting because they are the only people who can write a biography and an autobiography at the same time.