A Quote by J. M. Coetzee

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

J. M. Coetzee

Quote Topics

Autobiography Storytelling Writing

Quote Author

J. M. Coetzee
South African - Novelist
Born: February 9, 1940

I thought it would be more interesting to make a musical autobiography than an actual autobiography.

Ian Brown

I love to read autobiographies. [What is your favorite autobiography?] the autobiography of Coach John Wooden. Everybody has a struggle so it's about seeing how they overcome it and be the best they can.

Meb Keflezighi

Very few people have actually had a chance to see the raw material that was going to comprise these three chapters [of Malcolm X Autobiography]. The missing political testament that should have been in the autobiography, but isn't.

Manning Marable

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

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.

Salman Rushdie

My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.

Karrine Steffans

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

If you publish Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, no one will read it but if it's Madhuri Dixit's or Madhubala's autobiography people will come and read it.

Asrani

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

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

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

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.

Alberto Moravia

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

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Steven Wright

People are more interested in reading bombastic ideas, whether they're positive or negative. Part of me has sort of lost interest in doing criticism because of that. I've always realized that criticism is basically autobiography. Obviously in my criticism, it's very clear that it's autobiography, but I think it's that way for everybody.