Personal Narrative 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.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of their own imagination.

Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.

Sometimes being an actor is being a song in someone else's mixtape, so I really understand why more and more actors are making films of their own.

For me, clothing is nothing without the story behind it. Everything I own evokes some kind of memory.

Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

Cultural appropriation is a big problem, but the thing is, I didn't invent my life. I really lived in Africa.

No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices they would call "hard but necessary" for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.

As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.

Every day you live is a page. Every year, a chapter. Your life, a book. What is it about?

Every hero is the villain of his own story.

My mother giving birth to me was just like Lady Sybil giving birth, except that there wasn't such a tragic ending.

Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.

I had never met an Israeli before.

My tryst with theatre began in 1968, after the last day of school in that academic year.

I grew up loving history.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

I would spend my time telling stories or writing them.

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

I've been to India, and I never thought I'd go there.

Everyone has a story.

Growing up in Stockton wasn't all doom and gloom.