After reading Eminem's autobiography, which I did because I'm so interested in him as an artist, I respect him a lot. Even though he seems angry and mad, he's had to fight so many demons in his life.
A book is either autobiography or a novel.
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'
'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.
When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.
Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.
I realized going back and writing and explaining in details the difficulties I had lived actually became emotional again. It's like therapy but sometimes therapy can be painful. But it's part of life and part of the autobiography so I'll have to finish it sooner or later.
If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.
Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'
I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.
One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.
When you write something you know, you're making a story that will work, whether or not there's bits taken. It's always funny to me when people say, 'Well, it's clearly autobiographical,' and I say, 'Well, how do you know my autobiography?' Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it's a very interesting assumption.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
In 1994, to motivate me to complete my pilot's license, my good friend, Gregg Maryniak, gave me Charles Lindbergh's autobiography of his solo flight across the Atlantic.
'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.
I have my Grade 1 autobiography that says I'm going to the 2012 Olympic Games, and it has a picture of me on the podium. So, I've known my whole life. It's not something I just thought of. I've known I would be an Olympic athlete; didn't know what sport, but I drew myself in a judo gi.
It was a big thing for me to read black writers. 'Fences,' by August Wilson. James Baldwin's 'Amen Corner.' 'The Fire Next Time.' 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' of course.
For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'
A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.
Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.
When I was first approached about doing an autobiography, I said, 'absolutely not.' But when I sat down, memories came pouring out. It wrote very quickly - I think there was an emotional impulse, because once I started in, the story itself carried me along. It was a very intense writing period and took a year and change to finish.
So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.
My 'Report to Greco' is not an autobiography.
You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.
