A Quote by Tao Lin

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

Quote Topics

Accurate Autobiographical Autobiography Closer Creating Documenting Effect Fiction Focus Me Meaning Memory Reality Static Still Than View

Quote Author

Tao Lin
American - Novelist
Born: July 2, 1983

Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

Paul Auster

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

P. D. James

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

You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.

Paul Auster

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

Lisa Unger

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

Robert Hass

Whenever I wrote fiction, people always seemed to think that what I wrote was true, that it was entirely autobiographical. And when I would write non-fiction, they often accused me of exaggeration and fictionalization.

Jonathan Ames

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Raymond Carver

Even if the experience in my stories is not autobiographical and the actual plot is not autobiographical, the emotion is always somewhat autobiographical. I think there's some of me in every one of the stories.

Katie Wech

In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical - imagination ground through the mill of memory. It's impossible to separate the two ingredients.

Rohinton Mistry

I have very rarely written autobiographical stuff. "Greasy Lake" and some other works have some autobiographical elements, as does "Birnam Wood," the one I chose to end [this collection] with. I lived in that house and some of my feelings are expressed in it, but it's not autobiography. It was not me and that didn't happen exactly that way.

T.C. Boyle

Fiction always reveals a lot about the person who is writing it. That's the scary thing. Not in a straightforward autobiographical sense. But the flaws in a piece of fiction are, unhappily, so often also the flaws of the writer.

Katie Kitamura

All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.

James Joyce

I don't write non-fiction because I get bored. Some of my writing is autobiographical, but not the way readers imagine. I use my memory of settings, events and people. I weave history into my stories, but my narratives are made up.