Autobiography Quotes - page 4

In these pages, I continue the struggle to which my whole life is devoted. Describing, I also characterize and evaluate; narrating, I also defend myself, and more often attack. It seems to me that this is the only method of making an autobiography objective in a higher sense, that is, of making it the most adequate expression of personality, conditions, and epoch. Objectivity is not the pretended indifference with which confirmed hypocrisy, in speaking of friends and enemies, suggests indirectly to the reader what it finds inconvenient to state directly. Objectivity of this sort is nothing but a conventional trick. I do not need it. Since I have submitted to the necessity of writing about myself - nobody has as yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without writing about himself - I can have no reason to hide my sympathies or antipathies, my loves or my hates. (Leon Trotsky)
A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Franklin is a good type of our American manhood. Although not the wealthiest or the most powerful, he is undoubtedly, in the versatility of his genius and achievements, the greatest of our self-made men. The simple yet graphic story in the Autobiography of his steady rise from humble boyhood in a tallow-chandler shop, by industry, economy, and perseverance in self-improvement, to eminence, is the most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men. It is in itself a wonderful illustration of the results possible to be attained in a land of unequaled opportunity by following Franklin's maxims. View quote
Benjamin Franklin
In an autobiography one must surely be allowed to boast, just for fun. I have, at a range of twenty feet, shot the tobacco out of a cigarette and left the paper intact. At a range of thirty feet, I have split a target, edge towards me, with an air pistol. I am also the world's champion in a game called "You Are the Target," in which anyone better than I would be dead. The game is to shoot an arrow straight up and see how near to you it can be allowed to land. You have to watch its fall very carefully, but I have had it hit the ground exactly between my feet. Of course, there were no witnesses. Had there been, they would forcefully have discouraged the experiment. I was using a fifty-five pound bow. View quote
Alan Watts
In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H. G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind. View quote
Colin Wilson
I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974. View quote
Jeffrey Bernard
I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography. View quote
Kathy Griffin
All nonsense. Nobody knows the real Göring. I am a man of many parts, but the autobiography, what does that tell you? Nothing. And those books put out by the party press, they are less than useless. View quote
Hermann Göring
There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes. View quote
William Trevor
I was heavily influenced by my first attempt at a novel. I started a fantasy novel back in high school, and.... well... it really sucked. It was a plotless, clichéd mess. When I sat down to write this book, I wanted to make something much, much better. I wanted to write something that was pretty much the opposite of that first novel. Also, I read Cyrano De Bergerac, right before I started writing the book. Cyrano's character reminded me of some important things, namely, what it really means to be a tragic hero. You don't need a lot of the cliché fantasy trappings to have that cool character. I also read Giacomo Casanova's memoirs soon after starting this project. That opened my eyes to how interesting an autobiography could be, provided the person telling it has a way with words and has lived a sufficiently adventurous life.... View quote
Patrick Rothfuss
The first existentialist was not Sartre, though he coined the term. Nor was it Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, though most of the textbooks say so. Nor was it even Pascal, though he foreshadowed half of Kierkegaard and was the first to write about the fundamental existential experience of cosmic anxiety and meaninglessness. It was not even Saint Augustine, whose Confessions stands out as the profoundest example of depth psychology and existential autobiography ever written. It was not even Socrates, who alone among philosophers totally existed his philosophy. Rather, the first existentialist was Solomon, or whoever wrote Ecclesiastes. (Peter Kreeft)
A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography. Show me your garden, provided it be your own, and I will tell you what you are like. View quote
Alfred Austin
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. ... For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form - it may be called fleeting or eternal - is in neither case the stuff that life is made of. View quote
Walter Benjamin
There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. View quote
Thomas Szasz
The way I would live my life is: never do something in real life that I would not want to write about in my Autobiography. View quote
Siddharth Katragadda
I am planning on an autobiography. People should know something about me. View quote
Sachin Tendulkar
You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography. View quote
P. J. O'Rourke
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography. View quote
P. J. O'Rourke
I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school. View quote
Junot Diaz
My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives. View quote
Diane Keaton
I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called "My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business." A publisher came to me and said write a book so I did. I wanted to call it "Everybody Else Has Got a Book." (Dick Van Dyke)
In his autobiography, former President Bill Clinton credits [Andrew] Vachss with [writing the National Child Protection Act] and notes how important it was to him and wife Hillary. But there's a catch, according to Vachss: 'It's never been funded. View quote
Andrew Vachss
In an autobiography, I will have to write the truth, I should not hide anything. Just to avoid people's feelings, I should not be hiding things. If I don't present events as they happened, truthfully, it is not an autobiography at all. I have read Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography and if I can muster up the kind of courage that he had, I will write one. View quote
Rajinikanth
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. View quote
Alastair Campbell
I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.' View quote
Alexandra Roach