Richard Nixon Quotes

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

I do have a right to talk about my life, to tell my truth from my perspective.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

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

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

Somebody said, "Well, you're going to write your definitive book about your life, biography." No, I'm not. I haven't done that. I wrote a book of letters which gives an insight into the real me as opposed to the public perceptions of me. But I'm convinced historians will figure out the things we got wrong and hopefully the things we got right.

All autobiographies are alibi-ographies.

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

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

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way,' is Richard Holmes's version.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

Other people are talking about writing books about my life, or about some of the things I've done. I find it strange, but I also feel it's my life and my story, and I guess I better be the one to get it on paper the way it actually happened.

Everything I write is about me.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.