James Frey Quotes

I tell the truth, and I expose myself as a weak, misguided, misdirected, dysfunctional human being I used to be.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

I was 45 when I wrote most of this book [Hungry Heart ], at what felt like a halfway point in my life, and I thought, If I can't be honest now, when will it happen? It was so hard to step away from the [protection of] fiction, but I'm ready to talk start telling their truth.

It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.

One of the commitments I made to myself when I decided to write a book was to be brutally honest, particularly about myself.

I have faced up to what I am.

If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.

You've got to make a decision when you write about your life, and I decided I was going to be honest, and some of those things will be embarrassing.

An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.

I found from working on the film that I am a bigot, at times. And that I am also a coward, at times.

To dance at all is to confront oneself. It is the art of honesty.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

As a blogger, Chez Pazienza is filled with outrage, passion and insight -- delivered with a distinctive point of view, a wicked sense of humor, and a two-fisted style of prose. In Dead Star Twilight, he turns all these on himself -- and produces a fierce, funny, disturbing, but ultimately uplifting memoir. This is the book A Million Little Pieces dreamed of being.

One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.

In terms of my life, I guess I want to share whatever I've learned really, which is basically one thing: know yourself, look for yourself, know what to look for, cherish it, be honest, be authentic, even if it hurts your feelings. That's not bad.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

I was already in a groove and decided to initially write down everything, as I would in an actual diary, and then go back and take out what I was too shy to reveal. But I wound up leaving more in than I imagined, and that was because I wanted to be transparent and real.

I'm not very pious about anything, fortunately, but I'm skewering myself first. I'm skewering things that I care about and things that are important to me and then just my own foibles.

It's more important to know your weaknesses than your strengths.

I can tell more about my weaknesses than my strengths.

In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.

I'm very observant and very instinctive. In life, you have to have the vulnerability to accept when you are to blame. And I do have that, and I am open enough to say it.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

Being so honest in my writing is cathartic.