Autobiography Quotes

“:Category:Autobiographies”

“All autobiography is self-indulgent.”

“Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.”

“Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.”

“I don't think anybody should write his autobiography until after he's dead.”

“Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.”

“All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.”

“An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”

“autobiography”

“Wikipedia: Autobiography”

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

“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”

“A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.”

“An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.”

“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.”

“A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.”

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

“Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. [...] For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.”

“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.”

“I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering, which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.”