Paul Theroux Quotes

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.

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

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.

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

All autobiography is fiction.

I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God.

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

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.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

If you're going to write about your life, you must write about your life.

I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

I don't write autobiographically.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Everyone's always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not.

I always say that I take my life and turn it into story, and I certainly did that with 'Countdown'.

I like to write about what I've seen and experiences I've been through.

I know that it can be really difficult to read about your own life... in someone else's words.

I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

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.'

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.