Michael Franks Quotes

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

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.

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

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

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

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.

When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it.

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.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

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

I don't write autobiographically.

I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's stories trespass the truth of mine.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

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.

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

I told all kinds of stories about going to Japan, about playing ball with my father... I wanted to record my life in case it was going to end soon. So, I wrote that and it was very comforting to have that practice in the afternoons in my living room. I just wrote about my life.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.