Autobiography Quotes
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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
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp
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A book is either autobiography or a novel.
Imre Kertesz
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What's upsetting about an autobiography is that the final chapter is always missing. I mean, you want the death, don't you?
Ian Mckellen
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When Michael Frere came to see Elizabeth about her autobiography All the Dogs of My Life she found him ‘such a boring little man. But it is because we are all growing old, and the bones of our inadequate minds come through the flesh that hid them.’ She hadn’t always found him boring, and Love, one of her best novels, is largely based on their romance.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' – you are inhabiting that 'I.'
Kate Atkinson
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Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.
Ellery Sedgwick
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Let me put it in a positive light, with that archive [of Anne Romaine], we have gained extensive knowledge about how [Alex] Haley and Malcolm X actually worked and how the book, the autobiography, was constructed.
Manning Marable
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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.
Chuck Klosterman
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If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.
Albert Camus
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I am a total sucker for an actor's autobiography/biography. I have probably read most of them.
Kate Fleetwood
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The F.B.I. was very happy with the article they produced, which was entitled, "The Black Merchants of Hate," that came out in early 1963. What's significant about that piece is that that became the template for what evolved into the basic narrative structure of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Manning Marable