Lytton Strachey Quotes

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

If you're going to write about your life, you must write about your life.

I have always wanted to tell my story - or, more to the point, my side of the story.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

I knew that I had to write my memoirs.

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

The stories of wine lords who trade wine on intimidation or food critics who trade free meals for reviews... those are the stories of my life. I am telling the stories of my life in a true way.

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

A writer's work is to witness things.

I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.

The truth is, for however much my stories come out of things that have happened to me, they're not darkly or as deeply personal as someone like Marc Maron or a lot of comedians, but they are essentially my life and my interpretation of it.

The laws of literary creation are unique; they don't change, and they are the same for everyone everywhere. I mean that you can tell a story that covers three hours of human life or three centuries - it comes to the same thing. Each writer who creates something authentic in a natural way instinctively also creates the technique that suits him.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I love to write what I see and what I do and what I experience, and I like to see if people can relate to that. I don't know if I am as good at making up a story in my head that has no truth to it, so that is a challenge for me.

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

If you're gonna tell your life story, you gotta be honest, or don't do it.

The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.