I know writing is what I do but I still don't see myself as one.

"Writing about yourself is a funny business. At the end of the day it's just another story, the story you've chosen from the events of your life. I haven't told you "all" about myself. Discretion and the feelings of others don't allow it. But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind. In these pages I've tried to do that."

I don't have the feeling that I write my books. I have the feeling that my books get written through me and once they have got across me I feel empty and nothing is left.

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.

Writing about yourself is addictive. I hope all you kids noticed that. If you feel like autobiography, try heroin. Lots safer and easier to control…

If I have to write a book, it will be one to empower people, to advise people. I don't think I want to give a memoir of how I have had sex or how many times I have had an abortion; it doesn't make sense.

I don't think anyone could write a completely honest autobiography. I am sure no one could bear to read it: My Past Was An Evil River.

I loathe writing autobiographical material because if it's dull no-one should have to read it anyway, and if it's interesting I should be using it for a story.

Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.

How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

In moments of exhaustion, I think for some reason of writing an autobiography — proper work for tired artists — but every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life. Maybe, incidentally, this accounts for the paucity of women's autobiographies — they know better.

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.

In an autobiography, I will have to write the truth, I should not hide anything. Just to avoid people’s feelings, I should not be hiding things. If I don’t present events as they happened, truthfully, it is not an autobiography at all. I have read Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography and if I can muster up the kind of courage that he had, I will write one.

The way I've looked at it is that I want to write about myself and other people in the truest way possible. To write a true autobiography or biography, I have to know what the other person dreams and how her imagination works. I am less interested in dates and facts.