Albert Murray Quotes

So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.

All I've ever done since I was 17 is tell stories. You know, I'm a storyteller. And that's what I'm going to keep on doing, especially now, kind of embracing and making sure that we tell immigration.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

I told my whole life story in my book.

If you want to know anything about me, read my books - it's all there.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

I've written a lot of autobiography, which also involved listening.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.

I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

My friends have made the story of my life.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

It has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.

And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.

If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?

I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O.K., look, I've taken some liberties here." It's just a matter of being open with your readers.

I'm not an activist at all. I'm a filmmaker, and I wanted the people involved to tell their own story.