Best 258 quotes in «autobiography quotes» category

We live in a world when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening - all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke.

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.

...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. ...By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

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.

When I got off the train back home, I saw the WHITE and COLORED signs that had been there all along, as it it was the first time.

After my stroke I put down much of the luggage of my life. I didn't have to prove anything anymore - in business, in my personal life or whatever. And now, as I work on my autobiography, I enjoy looking back, seeing the connections, the causes and effects of my life.

Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That's like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children.

Years ago, there were tribes that roamed the earth, and every tribe had a magic person. Well, now, as you know, all the tribes have dispersed, but every so often you meet a magic person, and every so often, you meet someone from your tribe.

YOU AND YOU ALONE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN HAPPINESS, NOT ANYONE ELSE

You never know what’s lurking in the bloodstream, or skulking under the foreskin, or squatting in the liver, or flitting hither and thither from branch to branch in the bronchial forest.

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.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

All autobiography is fiction.

All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.

an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.

Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.

A new idea must not be judged by its immediate results.

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

[Autobiographies] are all the same - it's always rags-to-riches or I-slept-with-so-and-so. Damned if I'm going to say that.

Autobiographies, for the most part, to me, are like writing a love letter to yourself.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.

Autobiography is a wound where the blood of history does not dry.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.

biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.

Dammit, Dresden, if you want to know about me, wait for the autobiography like everyone else.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

I don't want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.

Documenting one's life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit.

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

I am a total sucker for an actor's autobiography/biography. I have probably read most of them.

I believe there's only one autobiography you can do.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.

I got out of autobiography because my story is, I was famous, it was hard for me, I got into therapy. I had trouble with food, I got a nutritionist. There's no story there.

I do like a good mystery. I'm reading Edgar Allan Poe now. I also like autobiographies.

I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.

If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I'm sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don't do that, I've hamstrung the melody.

I read Gloria Swanson's autobiography just because I wanted to know what it was like in the time.

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.

I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me.