Quotes About Autobiography

Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if their not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them.

There is no hint here that preaching is thought of primarily as self-expression of subjective experience or feeling-disclosure or autobiography or `telling one's story' so as to neglect Scripture."275 It is the Word that is to be preached.

The account of how Franklin's Autobiography came to be written and of the adventures of the original manuscript forms in itself an interesting story. The Autobiography is Franklin's longest work, and yet it is only a fragment. The first part, written as a letter to his son, William Franklin, was not intended for publication; and the composition is more informal and the narrative more personal than in the second part, from 1730 on, which was written with a view to publication.

one of the great autobiographies of the world.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

The first five chapters of the Autobiography were composed in England in 1771, continued in 1784-5, and again in 1788, at which date he brought it down to 1757. After a most extraordinary series of adventures, the original form of the manuscript was finally printed by Mr. John Bigelow, and is here reproduced in recognition of

I usually balance out autobiography with goofy, amusing stuff to help keep the humour in my more serious work.

I'd never put much thought into writing an autobiography before, because while I have this public persona of being extremely confident, I also am extremely filled with self-doubt, worry and insecurity. This book came about because I was trying to sell another book, unsuccessfully, about health and wellness.

'White Boy from Sacramento' is just sort of a tongue-in-cheek autobiography. I hoped it came out a little humorous, but it's really all true.

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction.

It's a presumptuous thing to write one's autobiography, but this is really an effort in the deepest sense to explore the struggle of a tortured individual to be himself in a hostile society.

Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred.

As a writer of the Romantic school, I would never be willing to transcribe a "real life" story, which would amount to evading the most important and most difficult part of creative writing: the construction of a plot. Besides, it would bore me to death. My view of what a good autobiography should be is contained in the title that Louis H. Sullivan gave to the story of his life: The Autobiography of an Idea.

Finally, there are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work: the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one's experiences hold for others

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography

Our tendency is to project out of our own autobiographies what we think other people want or need.

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.

Sometimes the pagan spirit of Roman poetry arouses qualms. Guibert of Nogent confesses in his autobiography that early in his monastic life he took up verse making and even fell into "certain obscene words and composed brief writings, worthless and immodest, in fact bereft of all decency," before abandoning this shocking practice in favor of commentaries on the Scriptures.

One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.

Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.

Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people -- the autobiographists and the biographists.

I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story.