A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.


All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.


An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.


Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.


Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.


Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.


Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.


Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.


Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.


Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.


Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.


Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.


I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.


I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.


I don't think anybody should write his autobiography until after he's dead.


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.


It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.


It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.


Members rise from CMG (known sometimes in Whitehall as ''Call Me God'') to KCMG (''Kindly Call Me God'') to GCMG (''God Calls Me God'').


My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan's life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.

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