“All autobiography is self-indulgent.” — Daphne du Maurier Quote

“All autobiography is self-indulgent.”

“I wondered straightaway how he could sit at peace there, of an evening, with the row of heads staring down at him. There were no pictures, no flowers: only the heads of chamois. The concession to melody was the radiogram and the stack of records of classical music.”

“Truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognize, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.”

“Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”

“It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.”

“I am opposed to autobiographies, mainly because most autobiographies lie.”

“I am a very honest, open person and I think there is a tendency in celebrity autobiographies to gloss over certain things which have happened.”

“I always felt ,like, I'll leave autobiographies to the people who are kind of iconic.”

“The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.”

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

“An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.”