What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great.
Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
If you believe the past can't be changed, you haven't read a celebrity's autobiography.
Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.
What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.
I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. ' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book. '
There's a lot of bullshit in Peter Fonda's autobiography. A great deal of it is complete fabrication.
I've been working on my autobiography, just pecking away in longhand. The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more detail you recall. It's not all pleasant!
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.
The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.
But, Tarantino has seen all of my movies. He's seen my good stuff, he's seen my bad stuff, he's seen the ones I directed, he's read my autobiography. There's an awful lot of things he knows about me, all of which I think had something to do with his casting.
Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.
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.
I love “The Autobiography of Malcolm X. ” That was like the only black book we read in high school. . .
An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.
Whenever I see an autobiography for sale in the book store i just flip to the about the author section. I'm like, "Done, next!"
One senses, in all autobiography, a straining toward perfection, perfection of a kind that connects the individual with a cosmic pattern which, because it is perfect in itself, verifies that individuals own potential perfection.
