Lisel Mueller Quotes

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

I think no one but me has the right to write about my life as I want to write it in a particular way. I don't think any other person will be able to tell the story of my life like how I have approached it. It works best when it's written by someone who has experienced it herself.

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.

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

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

When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.

I don't write about my life in my column.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.

To me, writing is a personal thing; I write super-personal, autobiographically.

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

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

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 think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.

There's me in every character I put on the pages.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

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

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

I believe there's only one autobiography you can do.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

Everything I write is about me.