Autobiographical Quotes

“All art is autobiographical.”

— Federico Fellini

“Core consciousness operates in the present, rebuilding itself moment by moment, mapping out how the self is altered by external objects, draping perceptions with feelings. Extended consciousness uses the same mechanisms, but now binds memories and language into each moment of core consciousness, qualifying emotional meaning with autobiographical past, labelling feelings and objects with words, and so on. Thus extended consciousness builds on emotional meaning, integrating memory, language, past and future, into the here and now of core consciousness. The selfsame neural handshaking mechanisms allow a vast expansion of parallel circuitry to be bound back into a single moment of perception.”

— Nick Lane

“Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?”

— Lauren Slater

“I do not teach truth as such; I do not transform myself into a diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy: I settle accounts , however I can, on a certain number of problems; with you and with me or me, and through you, me and me, with a certain number of authorities represented here. I understand that the place I am now occupying will not be left out of the exhibit or withdrawn form the scene. Nor do I intend to withhold even that which I shall call, to save time, an autobiographical demonstration, although I must ask you to shift its sense a little and to listen to it with another ear. I wish to take a certain pleasure in this, so that you may learn this pleasure from me.”

— Jacques Derrida

“There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.”

— Donald Barthelme

“The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.”

— Alice Munro

“Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.”

— Antonio Damasio

“Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.”

— Alison Bechdel

“The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.”

— Francois Truffaut

“First novels were always at least somewhat autobiographical,”

— Meg Wolitzer

“I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.”

— Amity Gaige

“'Bless Me, Ultima' is quite autobiographical in the sense that I was writing a story about my childhood, my hometown where I grew up, Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on Old Highway 66 and the Pecos River. So a great deal of that environment, landscape, people, got thrown in the novel.”

— Rudolfo Anaya

“When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.”

— Ben Marcus

“True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.”

— Harold Brodkey

“In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.”

— Bobbie Ann Mason

“I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!”

— Cecily Von Ziegesar

“One of the strongest features of Puritanism is its autobiographical tendency, its passionate self-regard.”

— Tom Paulin

“I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'”

— Tao Lin

“Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.”

— John Barton

“I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.”

— Natalie Merchant

“I occasionally experience the discomfort of people assuming my work is autobiographical.”

— Jonathan Tropper

“I've yet to write a stand-up show that isn't autobiographical.”

— Mike Birbiglia

“'Normal' is not clinical, it's not autobiographical, and I don't claim to be objective. It's strictly my perceptions and thoughts about the people that I met and the stories that I heard. It was never meant to be an academic work.”

— Amy Bloom

“All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.”

— Paul Auster

“The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.”

— Paul Auster

“It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical.”

— James Taylor

“All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.”

— Jeanne Moreau

“I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.”

— Oliver Sacks

“I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

“None of my movies are autobiographical.”

— Susanne Bier

“All of my songs are autobiographical.”

— Taylor Swift

“The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.”

— Tracy Chapman

“'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.”

— George R.R. Martin

“I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language.”

— Deborah Smith

“If I like hardcore straight-edge punk music, gentle psychedelic folk music, gangster rap, indie-rock with a lot of guitar pedals, and I find inspiration from all these things in different songs of mine, shouldn't I be allowed to make any of this kind of music that I want? And it's the same for the comic books, why should I only make autobiographical stories? Or only political stories? Or only superhero stories? Or only comedy stories? I am a bit creatively desperate, when I sit with a pen and paper I am desperate for ANY idea that makes me excited, I don't care what kind of idea it is!”

— Jeffrey Lewis

“It'd be tricky to read into my lyrics - some are autobiographical, but sometimes I just like the sound of words.”

— Max Tundra

“In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

“Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.”

— Cate Marvin

“Just because I write in the first person doesn't mean that all my songs are autobiographical.”

— Thalia Zedek

“Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.”

— Peter Adamson

“I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with.”

— Laura Z. Hobson

“I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.”

— Lee Krasner

“The things that I write are autobiographical in a surreal sense, like when you have a dream and you go to the doctor's office, but then you turn around and it's actually your childhood home and the doctor has turned into Ryan Reynolds.”

— Diablo Cody

“The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.”

— Antonio Damasio

“It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.”

— Patricia Hampl

“I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a tremendous compassion for him, which has grown over the years. A certain kind of pity for him also in that he was so unrealised as a human being, so dogged, and so shut-off from people in many ways. You know, I've been writing another book, and it's another non-fiction autobiographical work, kind of a compliment to "Winter Journal", and it's just finished.”

— Paul Auster

“All art is autobiographical - if it's not, it's not going to quicken on-stage, and it's not going to come alive.”

— Constantin Stanislavski

“All art is autobiographical. You can only create what you are.”

— Dale Carnegie

“The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there's anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it's that feeling. I always feel that way.”

— Dan Chaon