Best 258 quotes in «autobiography quotes» category

[The public has] the habit now of invalidating opinions emanating from me by reference to my age and infirmities.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

There's a lot of bullshit in Peter Fonda's autobiography. A great deal of it is complete fabrication.

The surroundings householders crave are glorified autobiographies.

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

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

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

The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.

Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies.

The theme of my autobiography could only be repetition.

They asked me what I wanted to call my autobiography. I suggested: The Definitive Volume on the Finest Bloody Fast Bowler That Ever Drew Breath.

9/11/01 Gina: Especially today, with the enormity of current events, I want to convey to you again, how much you mean to me and how proud I am to be your husband. The hard work that you are engaged in right now is exhausting, invisible and largely thankless in the short term. But honey, please know that buried at the core of this tedium is the most noble and important work in the world- God's work; the fruits of which you and I will be lucky enough to enjoy as we grow old together. Watching these little guys grow into men is a privilege that I am proud to share with you, and the perfect fulfillment of our marriage bonds. You are a great mom. You are a great wife. You are my best friend. You are very pretty. Happy Birthday. -Matt

When I bought out my first autobiography I received the biggest tax bill of my life.

A ball feels different off every player's racket-there are minute but concrete subtleties of force and spin. Now, hitting with her (Steffi Graf), I feel her subtleties. It's like touching her, though we're forty feet apart. Every forehand is foreplay.

A belief which is based on force of habit is one of the saddest and most harmful phenomena of our time－as in the shade of a stone wall everything new grows slowly, becoming stunted, lacking the sap of life. There were too few rays of love in that faith, too many insults, too much animosity and too much envy, which always goes hand in hand with hate. And the light emanating from that faith was nothing but the phosphorescent glow of putrefaction.

Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.

With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.

An Autobiography is the truest of all books,for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell (though I didn't use that figure)--the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

Advice is autobiography.

After a short time I felt my truck began to move. The force of the water and the rising floodwaters lifted me and my truck off the road and through an orchard, bumping into trees, flood debris and who knows what else.

a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.

All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.

And I came to recognize that, no matter how difficult the reality, you mustn't let yourself be beaten. You must have a strong will. You have to summon what you know is right from your innermost depths and follow it.

and I realized that real nobility is in the soul, not in a name.

..And songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.

Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport. His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.

Anyone with an autobiography is almost definitely an evil piece of shit.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.

Autobiographies are always written as if the author had it all mapped out with perfect foresight, ignoring the risks and uncertainties at that time. This misleads, as much as those beautiful photographs of a past holiday abstract from the heat, the mosquitoes, and the lack of connectivity.

Autobiography, we know, is flawed from the moment the nib of the pen touches the parchment.

Autobiography is a precious broken vase pieced painstakingly together still showing the chips and cracks. It is a broken truth revealing snapshots of a cracked and chipped life pieced pieced painstakingly together.

better to keep a good conscience with an empty purse, than to get a bad opinion of myself, with a full one.

be always sure you're right, THEN GO AHEAD!

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.

But there was no time to rest on my laurels.

... A man's wife can hold him devilish uneasy, if she begins to scold and fret, and perplex him, at a time when he has a full load for a railroad car on his mind already.

Bu öğretmen Linz Realschule'sindeki doktor Leopold Poetsch idi ve bu meziyetleri şahsında toplamıştı. Sert görünüşlğ, fakat içi iyilikle dolu saygıdeğer bir ihtiyardı. Gz kamaştırıcı görünüşü bizi etkiliyor ve peşinden sürüklüyordu. Ders verirken bize içinde bulunduğumuz zamanı unutturan ve bütün sınıfı sihirli bir şekilde geçmişin derinliklerine götürüp, orada yüzyıllarca sislerin altında kalmış birtakım tarihsel olaylara canlı bir gerçeklik kazandıran, bu saçları kırlaşmaya başlamış adamı, bugün bile büyük bir heyecan ile gözlerimin önüne getiririm. Biz öğrenciler, zihinlerimiz açılmış sinirlerimiz gerilmiş, gözlerimizden yaşlar gelecek kadar heyecanlı bir biçimde bu adamın dersini dinlerdik.

But I had already fallen. Fallen into this deep, dark hole. I was trapped. Trapped in this nightmare.

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.

Dialogue in the works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But 'Are you playing, Bob?' is one of only four sentences I have ever uttered to any Arsenal player (for the record the others are 'How's the leg, Bob?' to Bob Wilson, recovering from injury the following season; 'Can I have your autograph, please?' to Charlie George, Pat Rice, Alan Ball and Bertie Mee; and, well, 'How's the leg, Brian?' to Brian Marwood outside the Arsenal club shop when I was old enough to know better) and I can therefore vouch for its absolute authenticity.

Clearly everyone in my life who should have been vertical was horizontal.

Definition of my alcoholism One was too many and twenty was not enough.

Do you consider yourself a blessing or just another person?

Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn’t come through. It was just not there anymore. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew.

Eğer bu işe layıkıyla sarılmayıp da işi  ucundan tutarsanız, ancak basit bir geveze ve istismarcı olmaktan ileri gidemezsiniz.

Dylan [Thomas] I knew before and after he became famous. He was splendid, rapacious, demanding as a young man. To much has been written about him for me to add to the legend. As that legend began to grow in his lifetime I learned to separate him from his poetry, to find him in person increasingly tedious and his poems increasingly exciting, both in print and when he was reading them.

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]

Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.