A Quote by Franklin P. Jones

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

Franklin P. Jones

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About Autobiography Bad Except His Memory Nothing Reveals Writer

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Franklin P. Jones
American - Journalist
1908 - 1980

Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

Craig Venter

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

Doris Lessing

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

V. S. Naipaul

A writer's main tool is his memory - his own memory, the collective memory of his people. And the strongest memory is the one that is created by a wound to the heart.

Anatoly Rybakov

A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.

E. L. Doctorow

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

P. D. James

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.

Carolyn Wells

Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.

Neville Cardus

I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.

Clifton Fadiman

A writer's style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias...it is the Self escaping into the open.

E. B. White

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue.

John le Carre

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

Erica Jong

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.