Ellery Sedgwick Quotes

I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

I like to read. Autobiographies.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

I hope I didn't bore you too much with my life story.

Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.

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

My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.

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.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

I like to read everything, really, especially autobiographies.

You write an autobiography because you want to tell people how you felt about a certain matter at that time.

When you write an autobiography, it has to be authentic.

I don't think you're ever ready to read your life back to yourself and try to make it entertaining for others.

We just write about the stuff that happens to us.

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

Too many memoirs focus on childhoods and it's a bit turgid.

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.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

I grew up reading biographies on groups, and I love all that. The thing about biographies, it's the old cliché but it's true - a lot of the time these things are more about the author than they are about the group.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'