Humphrey Carpenter Quotes

The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

All autobiography is fiction.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

It’s terribly important to write your own history before the historians get a crack at it.

I have always wanted to tell my story - or, more to the point, my side of the story.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

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?'

I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

The truth is, for however much my stories come out of things that have happened to me, they're not darkly or as deeply personal as someone like Marc Maron or a lot of comedians, but they are essentially my life and my interpretation of it.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

It's an odd experience reading interviews with yourself. Interesting, though. Of course, you know that the journalist will have edited, rephrased or even rewritten what you actually said, but you can't help feeling that there's a special kind of truth in the way someone else paints you, however subjective they might be.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

It's actually easier to do autobiographical stories. The story is already there. It's a matter of carving away what doesn't fit rather than building up from nothing.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.