A Quote by Humphrey Carpenter

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

Humphrey Carpenter

Quote Topics

Autobiography Form Lying Most Respectable

Quote Author

Humphrey Carpenter
English - Author
August 29, 1946 - November 4, 2005

Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?

Jill Ker Conway

If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The most offensive is not their lying - one can always forgive lying - lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth - what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

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 at the moment of commemoration.

Walter Benjamin

... silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.

Pat Conroy

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Susan Sontag

The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake.

Oscar Wilde

Eclectic is a word that appears almost as much as the word smarmy in rock journalism and I've come to the fact, just as a personal side, this reminds of Oscar Wilde's insight that criticism is the highest form of autobiography. I think that's exactly what rock journalism has attempted to do, to celebrate its autobiography at my expense.

Van Dyke Parks

Frankly, most governments are used to lying to each other - to a degree that most people would find shocking. Part of diplomacy is the art of strategic lying.

Jonathan Turley

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

W. P. Kinsella

All criticism is a form of autobiography

Oscar Wilde

... most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn't elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.

Sarah-Patton Boyle

In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, "Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability." I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.