Top 88 Autobiographical Quotes

Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don’t always know how autobiographical you’re being.

The stories that I want to tell are completely, well, somewhat autobiographical. It’s completely based on my own self-absorption issues and problems.

In each of my characters there is a little of me. Not strictly autobiographical but a little piece of my soul.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you’re somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

Many filmmakers start off with an autobiographical film from childhood, and that’s kind of what I was thinking I would do, but other projects would just present themselves naturally in the beginning.

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

I wouldn’t say that my songs are autobiographical.

Lyrically, you know, most of the things on ‘Rumours’ were very autobiographical and very much conversations the three writers were having with other members of the band.

Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer’s life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read and admired as autobiographical expression. And thanks to the democratic exposures of the web, it’s easier than ever to document private experiences and divulge the most intimate secrets.

You’re always trying to make each record more autobiographical than the last one.

Anything I write is going to be autobiographical and true to some degree.

All my works over the years have been autobiographical in the sense they reflect some part of my life, although I have fictionalised them to an extent.

For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of ‘The Houston Kid’ takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.

Because of the wonderfully positive response to ‘Life’s That Way,’ I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff – maybe another book. I don’t know. It doesn’t help that I’m lazy.

My first book was called, ‘Mountain, Get Out of My Way,’ where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people’s lives and trying to be motivational.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

All of my films have been autobiographical – it’s all I’ve got to go on.

I’m certainly no Bruce Springsteen in terms of being a storyteller, but I’m trying to get a better handle on it and not always go after it from an autobiographical standpoint.

As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.

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.’

The autobiographical doesn’t interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

The old handbook on writing is ‘Write what you know.’ I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I’m not using fiction to extend the narrative.

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

What happened in 2008 stopped people in their tracks. People stopped looking at their homes simply as commodities to exploit and starting thinking about how they might personalise that space and make them less bland and more autobiographical, and that’s healthy, I think.

There’s always going to be a little bit of autobiographical content to everything. It’s how you lend some authority to what you write – you give it that weight by drawing on your direct experiences and indirect experiences from people that you know well, or a little.

Though my stories aren’t autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life.

‘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.

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

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It’s more ‘thematically personal’ – what’s up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

‘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.

Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.

People assume that a self-portrait is narcissistic and you’re trying to reveal something about yourself: fantasies or autobiographical information. In fact, none of my work is about me or my private life.

For years, I’ve written narrators who aren’t gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that’s different, obviously. But I’ve always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man’s thing.

I love James Baldwin’s autobiographical writing.

Sometimes I’ll write something that’s purely autobiographical, and sometimes pure fiction, and sometimes a mix.

There is no doubt that this film is autobiographical, but at the same time it also tries to portray an ordinary couple in a language that everyone can understand.

I’ll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don’t think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

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.

In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical – whether it deals directly with the author’s experience or not – because it captures what we’re obsessed with while working on that particular piece.

‘Tender’ is my most strongly autobiographical play.

I do think all art is autobiographical, and I do think I know quite a bit about women. I don’t know anything about men.

I don’t eschew autobiographical writing, but I’m not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being’s ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.

A lot of the novels that I’ve really enjoyed in my life, whether it’s Tolstoy’s ‘Cossacks,’ or ‘Sons and Lovers’ or ‘Jude the Obscure’ or ‘David Copperfield’ or ‘Herzog,’ have an autobiographical spine.

I had absolutely no trauma in my childhood. If anyone ever assumed that my books were autobiographical, they’d be sorely disappointed, because none of these things happened to me.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

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