320 Quotes About Autobiography

Where you stand on issues, how you live your life, and how much good you can do in the world are greater challenges than a lunar mission.

You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive.

Books seem the most potent source: each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I'm hoovering up lives at a ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person by sundown.

I am halfway through Hillary Clinton's latest called "Living History"...pretty lighthearted on the scale...unlike David Hick's autobiography...I had to skip a couple of hundred pages in the middle of that one because it was too distressing for me to read. Undoubtedly yours will be the same...I will read the beginning, skip all the awful bit in the middle and read your happy ever after bit at the end.

It was her smile that took me captive the day we met, and never once let me go. There was an authentic quality to her smile that made people stop and look; a basic human truth that seemed to emanate from deep within her and naturally find its way upward and out. Like the magma flow from Vesuvius, there was simply no stopping Cathy's smile. It could freeze people where they stood and hold them there, sometimes forever.That's what happened to me anyway.

In retrospect, come to think of it, isn't everything seen in retrospect?

Remember what I said. There's always a lot of autobiography in fiction and fiction in autobiography. It has to be that way otherwise they'd be unreadable (except by the author).

To me, that's the ultimate isolation - to be separated from my own mind.

We were scared. I guess when you're in your twenties, that's how it is. You've got an adult body, but you're trying to make it work with a kid's emotions. With Marilyn and me, it was worse. Our kid emotions didn't even work. We'd been treated too poorly.