Autobiography Quotes
104 quotes
"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."
"It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought."
"After I’m dead, I want to ghostwrite my autobiography."
"Sometimes, the way around prejudice is education."
"Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people."
"Motörhead is nothing if not democratic, but I don't think it's fair to be waving your dick around when people are minding their own business and might not want to see it."
"[His research into biblical criticism had lead him to the conclusion that most of what was contained in traditional religion simply wasn't true]Was I to lie in order to teach the truth? ...Was I to repeat these words? It was impossible. It was certain they would stick in my throat. On these grounds the separation was decided by me."
"Periodic Paralysis is not our friend"
Susan Q. Knittle-Hunter, Living with Periodic Paralysis: The Mystery Unraveled
"Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils."
"The features of character are carved out of adversity."
"We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations."
"But there was no time to rest on my laurels."
"Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
"If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction."
"Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility."
Katherine Paterson, The Spying Heart: More Thoughts on Reading and Writing Books for Children
"Your limits are somewhere up there, waiting for you to reach beyond infinity."
"Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That's like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children."
"Watching large mammals living their ordinary life in the jungle is extraordinary"
Antonio Rossano Mendes Pontes, Amazonia And Other Forests Of Brazil
"Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation"
"The stares were annoying, but I knew they didn’t mean any harm. So, every morning, smiling at them became part of my routine, too."
"Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam."
"Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it."
"This is what the war has done to me. Now I want to destroy because of it. There is such hate and rage inside me now. The Angkar has taught me to hate so deeply that I now know I have the power to destroy and kill."
Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
"When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans."
"I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster."
Avi Steinberg, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
"Freedom is difficult…but we have never had to put a wall up to keep the people in."
"Let your autobiography contain these words; "I was able to think positively, love affectionately and work efficiently". Thinking, loving and working are what make us different from animals and trees."
"... A man's wife can hold him devilish uneasy, if she begins to scold and fret, and perplex him, at a time when he has a full load for a railroad car on his mind already."
"I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation."
"I never want to make screw-you money like the rest of the financial services industry."
"Music is not my life. My life is music."
"Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding."
"Many great people had been considered to be boring, like Nigel Mansell, but anyone who had read the racing driver’s autobiography, "Clutch Down, Dick Out", would know that perception was way off the mark."
"Everyone has a home but me."
"I understand feminism to be a social savior because it liberates everyone without exclusion, whereas masculinism damns itself by measuring a man's health by the amount of sexual gratification he receives."
"It seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything that moved -a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you."
"Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please."
"Life's a book filled on pages Just awaiting to be written.Some don't open it for ages,Maybe afraid of being bitten."
"I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages."
"What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening - all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke."
"Let us make sure that future generation writes our biography."
"I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches."
"Know before whom thou stands. Understand your friends for who they are, not who you wish them to be. Accept them for their flaws as well as their attributes. Turn to them for their strengths, what good stuff they can bring to your life, and forget about the rest. To ask for more only sets you up for failure."
"I don,t just want success for my self ,I want my success to benefit others .Osman Gulum"
"I am halfway through Hillary Clinton's latest called "Living History"...pretty lighthearted on the scale...unlike David Hick's autobiography...I had to skip a couple of hundred pages in the middle of that one because it was too distressing for me to read. Undoubtedly yours will be the same...I will read the beginning, skip all the awful bit in the middle and read your happy ever after bit at the end."
Paige Garland, Prison post: Letters of support for Peter Greste
"These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important."
"If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory."
"Live your dreams, not your fears! A.Hume"
"It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election."
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