John Grogan Quotes

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.

I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.

I've never been interested or particularly good at censoring my experience.

I mean, my stand-up is very honest and exposing in this way. I probably carry that into everything I do.

I love being uncomfortable. I love feeling very revealed. And when I watch a piece of work that I've done, I'm actually looking for that. How naked is this character? How truthful is this character? If it's truthful, there's automatically a separation.

I've never been a confessional writer.

My whole act is confession.

If you write something that's personal, there's going to be elements of yourself in it.

I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.

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 will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

What I've found - and the older I get, the more I understand this and stand behind it - is, my whole life has been an exploration of telling the truth. It's scary to be truthful, and it's scary to reveal yourself, and I'm very attracted to doing things that scare me.

I am excited to show people how, when you get older, you get deeper, you get more raw, you get more honest, and you stop pretending to be the person you think people want you to be. I stopped worrying about what people wanted me to say and just sort of dug deep into my personal arsenal of my mistakes and shameful thoughts.

You've got to make a decision when you write about your life, and I decided I was going to be honest, and some of those things will be embarrassing.

When writing songs, especially if they're kinda semi-true to you, a lot of people hide behind whatever their idea of themselves is in the record, and every now and then, you might make a song that exposes something a little too much about you, and there's a part that doesn't want yourself to be exposed.

I think the best writing is full of honesty and conviction. A lot of people are afraid to reveal much of themselves.

I have always said what is in my heart.

There is a way to tell the truth about you without you; it's just a lot more work.

We only get better by telling our real story. That's the only way to be.

I was 45 when I wrote most of this book [Hungry Heart ], at what felt like a halfway point in my life, and I thought, If I can't be honest now, when will it happen? It was so hard to step away from the [protection of] fiction, but I'm ready to talk start telling their truth.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

I think the currency of leadership is transparency. You've got to be truthful. I don't think you should be vulnerable every day, but there are moments where you've got to share your soul and conscience with people and show them who you are, and not be afraid of it.

When you eliminate vanity from an art form, and I would think that this would be any art form, what is left is an opportunity to be incredibly naked and truthful.

In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.