A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.
My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'
Let's start at the very end: The postscript of Stephen King's 'On Writing' contains some of the most harrowing pages he has ever written. It's here that King describes the traffic accident that nearly killed him in June 1999.
I have to have some of my voice because I have my own experiences that I lived through.
After a summer trip to Switzerland, which was rich in experiences, I started writing. In the beginning, I aimed at descriptions of nature and folk life until, as the years passed, the description of man became my chief interest.
The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.
I feel like, in a lot of ways, 'Hidden Figures' is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read.
Nobody's life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.
Oh, I don't keep a journal. How you remember an incident is dictated by your emotional state at the time. How you receive the information that is coming in is definitely based on your history and who you are.
I actually didn't really go to college. I enrolled and never showed up. Being on a college campus where we shot some of the scenes in 'The Goodwin Games'... it did make me wish that was an experience that I had.
If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will.
I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.
Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
Most people's historical perspective begins with the day of their birth.
In writing the autobiography, I can really chuckle when I look at the songs. I was acting out the part. I saw myself as a victim.
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.
The most important story we'll ever write in life is our own-not with ink, but with our daily choices.
Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.
We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
In my early 20s, I was a big fan of Theodore Dreiser and might be one of the few people on the planet who have voluntarily read all his novels.
I don't recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories.
I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies.
