George H. W. Bush Quotes

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.

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'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

I write a lot about my experiences and the people I meet. I've got a lot of material. But a book about me? It seems sort of odd.

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

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

If you're going to write about your life, you must write about your life.

I don't think my husband has any plans to pen his memoirs. There are enough people doing that for him.

Too many memoirs focus on childhoods and it's a bit turgid.

I think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies.

Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else.

To be honest, I don't know. I started one [book] back in 1982 or '83 when I first retired. But I was only 25 or 26 and not ready to write my memoirs.

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.