autobiography quotes

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

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

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

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’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

I don’t want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.