Autobiographical Fiction Quotes

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.

It's called 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' by Dave Eggers. It is absolutely everything the title implies. It's the greatest book I've ever.

The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

Two of my favourite books are Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn.'

Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

It doesn't help for you to name a character's first name be Mindy and then be like, "I'm nothing like the character."

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

When you write a roman a clef, there is a tendency on the part of the reader to wonder how much of this is true, how much invented.

My favourite books are Charles Bukowski's 'Post Office' and 'Women.'

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

When my mother read 'The Joy Luck Club', she was always complaining to me how she had to tell her friends that, no, she was not the mother or any of the mothers in the book.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.

I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there's anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it's that feeling. I always feel that way.