Anne Stevenson Quotes

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

I have written about the women around me. My ancestors, my relatives, lovers. It was a way of trying to make it all make sense.

I love the privilege of looking back on my life every three years, turning it into a comedy show, and sharing it with an audience. It's incredibly cathartic.

With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.

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

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

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

My name is Daniel, and this is the first volume of my life story, which, hopefully, will be a very long and distinguished one. Who should you read it? Very good question. Maybe because this is your planet, and you have a right to know what's actually happening on it.

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else.

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.

I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down.

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

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.

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

All confessions are Odysseys.

I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography.

Why is every great children's story about a journey? Maybe that's because we are always on one.

I believe there's only one autobiography you can do.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.