Top 122 Autobiography Quotes

If I ever wrote an autobiography – and I won’t – it would be called ‘Don’t Google Me.’

Quincy Jones’ autobiography ‘Q’ is very good. Because he’s a master at music, he’s one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.

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.

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 have my Grade 1 autobiography that says I’m going to the 2012 Olympic Games, and it has a picture of me on the podium. So, I’ve known my whole life. It’s not something I just thought of. I’ve known I would be an Olympic athlete; didn’t know what sport, but I drew myself in a judo gi.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.

A novel, especially a first novel, is… really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I’m embarrassed at having had, I’ve written about.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

I do like reading autobiographies, if I’m honest.

In the mid-nineties, I quit my job as a senior feature writer at ‘The Mail’ on Sunday in the U.K. and became a ‘ghost writer,’ collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, soldiers and sporting legends who needed help in penning their autobiographies.

Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying ‘I,’ meaning ‘we.’

I think books, novels and autobiographies have a power to touch people far more personally than films do, so there’s a bit more of a responsibility when you then dramatise it.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I was sort of on a mission with ‘American Splendor.’ I wanted to try to prove that comics could do things. I wanted to expand them beyond superheroes and talking animals. And I knew that was going to take a long time. But I just started writing an autobiography about my quotidian life.

The year 2015 brought me so many further chances to spread the word about human rights violations in North Korea, from addressing the United Nations to publishing my autobiography.

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

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

I am a very honest, open person and I think there is a tendency in celebrity autobiographies to gloss over certain things which have happened.

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.

The re-releases have more than doubled the amount of Led Zeppelin work out there. I wanted it done authoritatively, ’cause I was the one writing the stuff; I was the producer and mixer. I don’t think it’s any more weird than writing your autobiography.

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

‘Illustrado’ is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness… The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too.

If the landscape changes, then I don’t know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.

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.

All of my plays are deeply autobiographical. But it’s not straight autobiography.

Memoirs are – memory is – rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable – a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

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.

Because I write fiction, I don’t write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as ‘I’ – you are inhabiting that ‘I.’

If you read any sort of, like, military general autobiographies or biographies, most of them never wanted to fight, you know? It’s necessary. War is necessary.

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you’re born and continues until the end.

I will surely pen my autobiography.

I love ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’ That was like the only black book we read in high school.

I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography.

Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.

I love watching old movies, and I read a lot of autobiographies.

My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.

Actually, that’s one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don’t want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

I don’t want to know about my biggest idols. I don’t want to read their autobiographies, I don’t want to find out what they’re really like.

There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there’s this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.

I wanted to emulate music from America – young punks playing rock n’ roll is what it was. I read part of Keith Richards’ autobiography, and it was totally parallel with me, learning from American records.

I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that’s one reason why I’m not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don’t want to write one!

My second book will be the autobiography of Destiny’s Child.

I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.

I was a fan of the Marx Brothers. One of them had this character where he pretended not to be able to talk, but then he wrote this autobiography called ‘Harpo Speaks!’ He wrote about how he quit school at nine years old to become a professional.

I think every artist’s next work will reflect a new chapter in their autobiography. Each album tells a story about where they were at during a particular period and how they have evolved.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

I can’t see an autobiography in my future. But who knows what might happen.

My approach to the work is the same, whether I had the lead or a supporting role. I consider myself a character actor in the true sense of the word. Unless I’m doing my autobiography, I’m playing a character.

Where’s the mileage in an autobiography? Anyone who writes one inevitably casts themselves as a hero, and I’m not about to do that.

I’ve read ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ at different ages and interpret something new each time.

If I ever write an autobiography, ‘Hilariously Unhappy’ could very well be the title.

Of course it’s fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who’ve never met me, who don’t know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he’s just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was.

I like autobiographies. I wouldn’t mind making one of those.

I’m a huge Jackie Chan fan, and my boyfriend is Taiwanese, and he doesn’t like to read. He had this Jackie Chan book, and I was asking him questions about him, and he didn’t know, and I said, ‘What do you mean you don’t know? You have the Jackie Chan autobiography right there on the bookshelf!’

‘Panto!’ is basically my life. It’s not a comedy drama; it’s a documentary. I was going to write an autobiography, but I thought I’d write this instead.

In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world – God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator.