Elizabeth Gaskell Quotes

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else.

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium

I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.

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

I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.

Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.

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

'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

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

I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.

You know, I'm trying to sometimes sit down and write some stories about my childhood and maybe one when I'm an old lady put them out like a book.

I haven't read any of the autobiographies about me.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

I told my whole life story in my book.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

There is properly no history; only biography.

I enjoy looking back on my life. I'm thinking seriously about starting to write about it.

I worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa - that came out in 1988 - called 'The Village of Waiting.'

I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.

I was going to write an autobiography once. I started writing it, and then I thought, 'No, let them dig around when I'm dead.'

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.