Ricky Gervais Quotes

I very much want to write about some elements of my own growing up.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

Everything I do is autobiographical in some way. 'Wayne's World' was me growing up in the suburbs of Toronto and listening to heavy metal, and 'Austin Powers' was every bit of British culture that my father, who passed away in 1991, had forced me to watch and taught me to love.

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood.

Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.

For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of 'The Houston Kid' takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

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

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!

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.

What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.

It has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public.

In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.

I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

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.