David Leavitt Quotes

I don't write autobiographically.

I don't like the word 'autobiography.' I rather like the term 'autofiction.' The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.

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.

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've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.

Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.

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.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

'Ghost City' began as a idea. I felt that I hadn't read or heard a great deal about the sort of life that I thought I had, and I just thought that it would be interesting to sit down and see if I could put it down onto paper.

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

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

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

There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in 'A Feather on the Breath of God' I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out.

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

I never like to put myself in the stories; in 'Lost in the City,' there are fourteen stories, and there's only one, 'The First Day,' about a little girl going to school, that has anything to do with me.