Peter Ackroyd Quotes

I'm an avid biography reader.

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.

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

I hate biographies which say, I was called to such and such an office, and he offered me so and so, and I got so and so money. I find that very tedious. The best biographies are written by other people.

I write about true-life type things.

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

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

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.

The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.

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

American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

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

I would like to continue to tell stories of what I did in a biographical way, so I will continue to write.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

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

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

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 some very good friends who've written memoirs, but it's not for me. It's just not a format that I'm interested in.

One of these days when I'm finished coaching at Alabama, I'll write an authorized book because there's only one expert on my life, and guess who that is... me. And there won't be any misinformation. There won't be any false statements. There won't be any hearsay. There won't be any expert analysis from anybody else. It will be the real deal.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.