Philip Guedalla Quotes

I knew that I had to write my memoirs.

Yes, I have two books that are about me: one of them I wrote, and the other one was written about me. One of my books, which is called 'Spying on Miss Muller,' is really about me even though it's a novel. My autobiography is called 'Once Upon a Time.'

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom.

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.

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.

I enjoy looking back on my life. I'm thinking seriously about starting to write about it.

I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.

With the story of your life, you dont get to write the whole book, just your character.

One of the advantages of being dead, I guess, is that somebody else can edit all this.

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

The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian.

You are writing the story of your only life every single minute of every day.

I approach stories as a private educational enterprise: I want to learn about something. I teach myself through research, reporting, and thinking, and then, when I feel like I know the story, I tell it to readers.

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

I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers.

I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.

Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

I want to write my life. I want to be able to write my life. You are a second away from saying it. You have no idea how much I love you.

Somebody said, "Well, you're going to write your definitive book about your life, biography." No, I'm not. I haven't done that. I wrote a book of letters which gives an insight into the real me as opposed to the public perceptions of me. But I'm convinced historians will figure out the things we got wrong and hopefully the things we got right.

The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.

I never stopped writing. I started writing when I was twelve years of age. And I was writing all the time. But nothing was translated until thirty years after I started writing, when The Hidden Face of Eve was translated in 1980.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).