Top 427 Autobiography Quotes & Sayings

Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.

Tina Fey's autobiography is very, very funny and very well written. It's her life story: it's about how she grows up in New York. There's no obvious reason why I should enjoy this - I mean, this is the autobiography of a woman in her early 40s in New York. I'm a guy from a small town in Denmark.

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.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back - I get glimpses of them in the mirror - and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.

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.

Autobiography is mostly alibiography.

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.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.

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.

'My Life' is not an autobiography. It's just music.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

A book is either autobiography or a novel.

Eclectic is a word that appears almost as much as the word smarmy in rock journalism and I've come to the fact, just as a personal side, this reminds of Oscar Wilde's insight that criticism is the highest form of autobiography. I think that's exactly what rock journalism has attempted to do, to celebrate its autobiography at my expense.

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

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.

An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All criticism is a form of autobiography

Literary lineage is part of your autobiography. The authors are the literary base, the image base, the character base that you bring into your civilian work. Same with film, architecture, music, sports. That's one tributary of the autobiography.

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

My genetic autobiography can be found throughout my body.

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.

Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life.

I will surely pen my autobiography.

My 'Report to Greco' is not an autobiography.

All autobiography is fiction.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

All of my plays are deeply autobiographical. But it's not straight autobiography.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

The way people move is their autobiography in motion.

The theme of my autobiography could only be repetition.

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

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

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.

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

History is the autobiography of a madman.

My autobiography was simply the story of my life.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

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.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

I believe there's only one autobiography you can do.

When you write an autobiography, it has to be authentic.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

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

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.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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.

Photos are our autobiography, a way of telling who we are.