Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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

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.

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

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

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.

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

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

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

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.

I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

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.

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

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.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

To me, writing is a personal thing; I write super-personal, autobiographically.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

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.

My 'Report to Greco' is not an autobiography.

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

Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.

For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.

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

I do like reading autobiographies, if I'm honest.

If I ever wrote an autobiography - and I won't - it would be called 'Don't Google Me.'