118 quotes found
“I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day...”
“What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening - all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke.”
“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and w...”
“Know before whom thou stands. Understand your friends for who they are, not who you wish them to be. Accept them for their flaws as well as their attributes. Turn to them for their strengths, what ...”
“A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to ...”
“One day someone is going to read my autobiography and say “Wow, what a horror novel”
“You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.”
“Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.”
“It was her smile that took me captive the day we met, and never once let me go. There was an authentic quality to her smile that made people stop and look; a basic human truth that seemed to emanat...”
“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”
“Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderatel...”
“I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.”
“Audrey Hepburn, as famous as she was, packed her own suitcases... I don’t know why that struck me, but it did. 'She has a servant’s heart,' I thought.”
“It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. ...”
“..my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me. The town he lived in and the town I lived in were not the same.”
“I just want to this about that.”
“Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, wa...”
“Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national c...”
