Autobiographical Influence Quotes

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days.

In each of my characters there is a little of me. Not strictly autobiographical but a little piece of my soul.

Everything was based on my life and the way I grew up. Some of the bits I'm most proud of in 'Haters Back Off' actually happened.

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.

When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.

I wrote 'Marvels,' which was about a guy who had two daughters, and I wrote 'Astro City Volume 2 #1,' which was about a guy who had two daughters. In both cases, about a year and a half or two years apart. And then after that, I had two daughters, about a year and a half or two years apart.

My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.

I thought I was done making CIA movies after 'The Bourne Identity.' I really had used my father's work in Iran-Contra on 'The Bourne Identity.' You get one experience like that in your life where you have personal exposure to something, and you put it in a movie. That's it.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

My life has been wild enough to derive all of the stories you need out of it. I've been through many, many years of behavioral problems, so I don't really look outside for stories.

When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century.

We've always written from personal experiences.

'My Night at Maud's,' 'Claire's Knee,' 'Chloe in the Afternoon' are grafted onto my life.

Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.

Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this - and it is a very large problem - is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own complicated makeup.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

I decided with 'Savage Season' to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.

When I started to write a tune, I just wrote the nearest at hand, which was what was happening in my own life.