Richard Linklater Quotes

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

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

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

My music is about my life. If it's something that I've lived, then it's something that I've written about.

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

In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

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

I've been asked to write an autobiography, and I've started it a couple of times, on different angles, and maybe one day I will, but you know what? There's time for that because I'd like to have the whole story.

First novels tend to be blood-lettings, and they're focused on you, not the reader.

I've been writing, in one way or another, for as long as I can remember.

I write something that I believe I've made up, and it's only when a friend later points it out to me that I realise I've been writing about myself again.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

Writing has always been an interest of mine, and 'The Language of Flowers' combined my experience with foster care with something I've always wanted to do.

I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us - so I do.

To me, writing is a personal thing; I write super-personal, autobiographically.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.

We've always written from personal experiences.

I read a quote to the effect that we are always writing about ourselves no matter what we're doing. That may be so.