“An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”
“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”
“When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do -- well, that's Memoirs.”
“All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.”
“Members rise from CMG (known sometimes in Whitehall as ''Call Me God'') to KCMG (''Kindly Call Me God'') to GCMG (''God Calls Me God'').”
“I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.”
“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.”
“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
“It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.”
“Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”
“Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.”
“Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.”
“Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.”
“I don't think anybody should write his autobiography until after he's dead.”
“I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.”
“When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.”
“Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.”
“Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.”
“The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.”
“Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.”
“We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.”
“I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.”
“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?”
“Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.”
“Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.”
“The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.”
“There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.”