A Quote by Sandra Tsing Loh

All autobiography is fiction.

Sandra Tsing Loh

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Autobiography Fiction

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Sandra Tsing Loh
American - Writer
Born: February 11, 1962

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

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

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

P. D. James

I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'

Tao Lin

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

Tom Stoppard

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

Martine Syms

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

Jill Ker Conway

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

H. L. Mencken

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction.

Dinaw Mengestu

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

Arthur Smith

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

V. S. Naipaul

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

Garth Greenwell

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

William Trevor

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson

With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.

Kate Zambreno

'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.

David Garrow

A Quote by Sandra Tsing Loh

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