Caitlin Doughty Quotes

It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

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

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

Share your true stories.

Most writers write from their own experiences. That is where the honesty and intensity of emotions come from.

I'm not a gifted storyteller, so I write what I know and hope that honesty resonates with other people's experiences.

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'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

I knew that I had to write my memoirs.

My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography.

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.

In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.