Autobiography Quotes
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All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.
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A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
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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.
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Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.
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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.
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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A book is either autobiography or a novel.
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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.'
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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?
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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.
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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.
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I am a total sucker for an actor's autobiography/biography. I have probably read most of them.
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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.
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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.
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A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.
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Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'
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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.
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Often your face is your autobiography.
