Tao Lin Quotes

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.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

I don't like the word 'autobiography.' I rather like the term 'autofiction.' The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

I write autobiographically, although I apply liberal amounts of poetic license.

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

I categorically resist this idea that films are supposed to be autobiographical and the only stories you tell are about your own life.

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.

If I am writing down something and it is my idea, my imagination, it won't be fact.

There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in 'A Feather on the Breath of God' I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out.

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.

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

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

I always write about my own experiences, whether I've had them or not.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

The way we remember people, even their beauty is all so subjective and a matter of perspective.

A lot of my songs are about things that concern me personally, not a heightened version of myself or any of the characters that I play.

We are all at the center of our own narrative, but it's a narrative that changes every time we retell it.

You do your best to tell your own story, in the most specific way, and then you hope that that travels well, when it's done with heart and honesty.