Nick Earls Quotes

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

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've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

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.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radiance of Tomorrow' pulling at me because of the first book.

Autobiography should be more stringent. It should adhere more to the standards of journalism - assuming that journalism has the truth. The memoir gives you more scope, is more poetic, and allows you to play around with your own life.

You write an autobiography because you want to tell people how you felt about a certain matter at that time.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.

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.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

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