A Quote by Lionel Shriver

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Lionel Shriver

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Assumed Autobiography Novelists Often Too Write

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Lionel Shriver
American - Journalist
Born: May 18, 1957

With the publishing of The Basic Eight, it was often assumed that I was really immature and callow, and with the publishing of Watch Your Mouth, it was assumed that I was oversexualized, and with Lemony Snicket, it's often assumed that I'm erudite and depressed. But all the voices more or less came naturally to me.

Daniel Handler

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

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

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Graham Greene

I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.

Nadine Gordimer

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

I you're writing memoir, but it even comes up in fiction. People just assume that you're writing thinly veiled autobiography. And particularly, I think, for people of color, our work is always seen as kind of anthropological artifact regardless. So, there's always going to be that assumption, but even more so in a memoir because often the names aren't even changed. It is easier to verify.

Faith Adiele

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Kurt Vonnegut

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.

C. J. Box

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.

Robert Frost

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

Anna Quindlen

When you first start off, I know singers who have only been in the business just a short amount of time, and they've already written their autobiography. I didn't want to write it too soon. I wanted to live a while and write about things that I felt were important to me - growing up in Wales, and the characters that I met and listened to.

Tom Jones

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Thomas Bernhard

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

Martin Amis

To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.

Groucho Marx

'Panto!' is basically my life. It's not a comedy drama; it's a documentary. I was going to write an autobiography, but I thought I'd write this instead.

John Bishop

A Quote by Lionel Shriver

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