Quotes Tagged "autobiography"

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

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

[His research into biblical criticism had lead him to the conclusion that most of what was contained in traditional religion simply wasn't true] Was I to lie in order to teach the truth? ...Was I to repeat these words? It was impossible. It was certain they would stick in my throat. On these grounds the separation was decided by me.

Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils.

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.

Your limits are somewhere up there, waiting for you to reach beyond infinity.

The most useless questions an adult can ask a child- What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that's the end

Watching large mammals living their ordinary life in the jungle is extraordinary

Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport. His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.

Sometimes, the way around prejudice is education.

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

My 'Report to Greco' is not an autobiography.