Mary Augusta Ward Quotes

I'm in a position to look back at my life, and I realized there were a number of experiences that needed to be documented.

When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?

Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.

I've been asked to write an autobiography, and I've started it a couple of times, on different angles, and maybe one day I will, but you know what? There's time for that because I'd like to have the whole story.

I enjoy looking back on my life. I'm thinking seriously about starting to write about it.

I'll admit, when I look back on the past couple decades, a lot of it seems like a blur.

I was worried that one day, 40 years from now, I would look back and wouldn't be able to remember the details of my life, so I've written them all down.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

I hope before I am getting too old and when my mind is still functioning, I can tell some better stories.

It's taken me longer still to realize what a short span there is between those life experiences and the rest of your life. That's a job for the people who lived through it.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

You look back and you remember the good, the bad and the ugly.

I told my whole life story in my book.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

I may have crossed three-fourths of my life and I felt it would be worth jotting down my life in movies spanning decades.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

Storytelling is not what I do for a living - it is how I do all that I do while I am living.

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

I'm a lot older than I was when I was 30, which is kind of hard to believe.

The further you go, what, I'm gonna wait til I'm 80? Naw, I'm tellin' my story now. I was just moved. I was moved to tell my story. You know? People write books all the time.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.