A Quote by Margaret Atwood

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body - you thoughts, your actions, your food - the thing you feed your life.
Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.
I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.
We're artists. We cry out to be exploited on some level. Write a dissertation on my work. Write a biography about me.
For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.
The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.
I would like to write my biography sometime. I love to write. I could write for weeks and weeks, maybe say nothing but just for the writing.
People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.
Digging up new information and speculating on it isn't your primary purpose when you're writing a biography intended for young readers, unless you ?nd compelling evidence that departs from the accepted wisdom. A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record.
When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.
I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.
I was interested in the ways we can write biography. When you're first starting to write about your own life it feels so shapeless because you don't know how to make your own story cohesive. How do I pluck a story out of the entirety of what it means to be alive. It occurred to me recently that when you're telling a story about your own life, rather than taking a chunk, you're kinda like lifting a thread from a loom.
It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
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