Famous Quotes About Autobiography By Reference

-26 Items- A great collection of quotes about Autobiography. Quotations are arranged alphabetically and can be sorted by any header. This list of Autobiography sayings and quotes includes the sources and authors of the Autobiography quotes when possible. We hope you find this list of quotations about the topic Autobiography useful as a reference list or informative as you surf the web, and you can find many other lists of quotes about subjects on Ranker. Use this factual list to make a whole new one just like it, then re-rank it to fit your opinion.

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1

All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

Dorothy Parker

Autobiography
2

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

Quentin Crisp

Autobiography
3

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

John Berger

Autobiography
4

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.

George Orwell

Autobiography
5

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.

Italo Calvino

Autobiography
6

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Salvador Dalí

Autobiography
7

Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

Evelyn Waugh

Autobiography
8

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

W. H. Auden

Autobiography
9

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Henry Kissinger

Autobiography
10

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

Oscar Wilde

Autobiography
11

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

Samuel Goldwyn

Autobiography
12

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.

Philip Roth

Autobiography
13

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Autobiography
14

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

Philip Roth

Autobiography
15

My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan's life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Autobiography
16

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. 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.

Walter Benjamin

Autobiography
17

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Autobiography
18

The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.

Eric Hoffer

Autobiography
19

The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

Groucho Marx

Autobiography
20

There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.

Raymond Chandler

Autobiography
21

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

Virginia Woolf

Autobiography
22

Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.

Edward Gibbon

Autobiography
23

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

Edward Dahlberg

Autobiography
24

What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?

Logan Pearsall Smith

Autobiography
25

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do -- well, that's Memoirs.

Will Rogers

Autobiography
26

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

Elias Canetti

Autobiography

Showing items 1 - 25 of 26

Famous Quotes About Autobiography you can use this list to help make your own ranked list about this topic

All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

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

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

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.

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

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

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

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

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.

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan's life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.

Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do -- well, that's Memoirs.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.