What pursuit is more elegant t...

What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?

~Logan Pearsall Smith~

Thus when I come to shape here...

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

~Virginia Woolf~

That which resembles most livi...

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

~Benjamin Franklin~

My Turn is the distilled bathw...

My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan's life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.

~Barbara Ehrenreich~

It is long ere we discover how...

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

I dislike modern memoirs. They...

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

~Oscar Wilde~

I am being frank about myself ...

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

~Henry Kissinger~

Every autobiography is concern...

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

~Wystan Hugh Auden ~

All those writers who write ab...

All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

~Dorothy Parker~

A man's memory is bound to be ...

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.

~Fawn M. Brodie~