Quotes on Autobiography :: Finest Quotes

Autobiography Quotes

An autobiography can distort, facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies. It reveals the writer totally.

V. S. Naipaul

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster\'s autobiography.

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course being also a novelist am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

Margaret Eleanor Atwood

Today I read your autobiography in two volumes, Living My Life. These two books full of life, shocked me greatly. Your roaring of forty years like spring thunder, knocked at the door of my living grave throughout the whole book. At this time, silence lost its effect, the fire of my life was lit, I want to come to life and go through great anguish, immeasurable joy, dark despair and enthusiastic hope, throughout the peak and the abyss of life. I will calmly go on living with an attitude you taught me until I spend my whole life.

Li Yaotang

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 formit may be called fleeting or eternalis in neither case the stuff that life is made of.

Walter Bendix Schnflies Benjamin

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