320 Quotes About Autobiography

Badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.

Not needlessly to confound the herald with the historian, and begin a relation by a pedigree, I shall content myself to inform you [only gives, thankfully, his mother and father].

The role of a novice and professional writer coincide but are not identical. We expect more insight – ideas from the professional – and expect more realism from the novice.

Narrative essay writing affords sufficient opportunity for the writer to collect data, organize information, rationally process a matrix of collected material, reduce the essence of experience to assigned territories, and by doing so logically quantify their personal existence. Essay writing is an apt form to catalogue discordant incidences and as such writing prose oftentimes calls for the essayist to draw hard and fast classifications and conclusions.

Essay writing is an act of rebellion against walking through life as an empty intellectual shell and as an emotional vacuum. Essayists attempt to bridge the gap between meaningful self-exploration and raising conscious awareness of the larger world that we occupy. Essayist need to understand, they seek to broker compromises with the past, and meld truths out of broken shards of their history.

The World doesn't require me, but I require the World.

Everybody has some secrets he cannot bear to divulge; everybody also has some illusions about himself, which it is almost impossible for him to regard as illusions. However, although it is not possible to write a wholly true autobiography, neither is it possible to write one that contains no truth at all. [How to Read a Book (1972), P. 241]

There is never a destination, just the impulse to grow. My only policy through has been to keep an open mind and whatever I may do, to give it my all.

Detesto scrivere pezzi autobiografici: se il materiale è noioso non bisognerebbe infliggerlo a nessuno, e se è interessante dovrei usarlo per un racconto.