Emma Healey Quotes

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.

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.

When I lead essay workshops, I ask students to come up with at least five topics, which they'll narrow down to one. The winning idea should be the story the student is most excited to tell because it honestly reflects his or her best self.

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.

It's actually easier to do autobiographical stories. The story is already there. It's a matter of carving away what doesn't fit rather than building up from nothing.

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.

Anything I write is going to be autobiographical and true to some degree.

When I write for myself, I think about myself and draw from my own experience.

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'.

I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

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.

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

In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

The first audience that you have when writing a book is you.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

A story about my life should not be particularly interesting, but it is: it's just about me and some kids who didn't know how to talk to each other. It's personal but not autobiographical.

Anyone who writes an autobiographical work at the age of 34 is, at best, presumptuous. It occurred to me that it was time to set the record straight.

The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

Maybe I would have become an actor. I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital - being outside of social action for so long - turned me into an observer. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped.