E. L. Doctorow Quotes

The further you go, what, I'm gonna wait til I'm 80? Naw, I'm tellin' my story now. I was just moved. I was moved to tell my story. You know? People write books all the time.

My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives.

I'm just basically telling a story of my life.

I've been asked to write an autobiography, and I've started it a couple of times, on different angles, and maybe one day I will, but you know what? There's time for that because I'd like to have the whole story.

I told my whole life story in my book.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Biography is the best history.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

I always say that I take my life and turn it into story, and I certainly did that with 'Countdown'.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

It's important for us to tell our stories.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Every story you tell is your own story.

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.

I don't think I've ever really pursued telling my story, but I think things come to you at the right time.

The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.

No matter what you do, your job is to tell your story.

I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down.