Milan Kundera Quotes

In 'Out of the Dark,' I'm talking about my own life. I'm not talking as a character or speaking as a character. I was not as free as when I write fiction.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

When I write for myself, I think about myself and draw from my own experience.

I'm such a first-person writer.

I write about personal experiences.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.

I've never been a confessional writer.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

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

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

It's fun to write about myself, but I feel like I would bore people with that.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.