Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

When you write an autobiography, it has to be authentic.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

I loved Victoria Glendinning's bio of Vita Sackville-West. I also loved Michael Holroyd's immense biography of Lytton Strachey.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

A novel, especially a first novel, is... really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I'm embarrassed at having had, I've written about.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.

In his new autobiography, 'Capital Gaines,' Chip talks about the farm work - and he says he does, in fact, do it himself.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

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.'