Norman MacCaig Quotes

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.

Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about.

We've always written from personal experiences.

I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.

I kinda write in sequences that I live through.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

I write about true-life type things.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.

I only write about what I do, what happens to me.

I write about personal experiences. I write about things that have happened to me and the people around me, so you just sort of keep this antenna up and on the lookout for things to say.

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

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

Autobiography should be more stringent. It should adhere more to the standards of journalism - assuming that journalism has the truth. The memoir gives you more scope, is more poetic, and allows you to play around with your own life.

I write about what happens to me. It's all there. I couldn't do it any other way.

I write about personal experiences.

I think it's easier for me to write from experience.

I try to write about things that actually happened so that I know it's real before I put it down on paper.

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.