Greg Mottola Quotes

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

I told my whole life story in my book.

When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

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

I always say that I take my life and turn it into story, and I certainly did that with 'Countdown'.

With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.

I've always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

I needed time to stand back and go through a lot more experience in life. Then I have something to write about, joke or to animate.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.

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

If your life is worth thinking about,it is worth writing about.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

To be honest, I don't know. I started one [book] back in 1982 or '83 when I first retired. But I was only 25 or 26 and not ready to write my memoirs.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.

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

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.