Faith Ringgold Quotes

I like autobiographies. I wouldn't mind making one of those.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

I'm not on a record like some rapper trying to boast about my clothes or where I'm from. I'm creating stories, experiences, the way places make me feel, the way a person makes me feel.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

I don't know what gives me more pleasure: watching my story unfold or going in and watching a room full of black people talking for me and writing words for black people.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

I'm very detail oriented. I think that's why people enjoy my memoirs - because I tend to remember everything.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

If you want to know anything about me, read my books - it's all there.

If you're going to document your own journey, the jokes work better in the first person, just like the stories do.

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

I find it hard to write in the first person.

There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in 'A Feather on the Breath of God' I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out.

I like to write about what I've seen and experiences I've been through.

As irony would have it, the very person who inspired me to write a memoir... was the only person to be ejected from it. My brother didn't appear in 'Out of Egypt.'

'White Boy from Sacramento' is just sort of a tongue-in-cheek autobiography. I hoped it came out a little humorous, but it's really all true.

I like to talk about my life.

I had many doubts while writing my autobiography. I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested to read about my life.

How do you tell a story that you're a part of without it being a big ego trip?

I'm not the standard Asian girl.

The old handbook on writing is 'Write what you know.' I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I'm not using fiction to extend the narrative.

I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally.

Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.