My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

An ancient author tells us somewhere, with the tone of a pedagogue, if you have not done anything worthy of being recorded, at least write something worthy of being read. It is a precept as beautiful as a diamond of the first water cut in England, but it cannot be applied to me, because I have not written either a novel, or the life of an illustrious character. Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life. I have lived without dreaming that I should ever take a fancy to write the history of my life, and, for that very reason, my Memoirs may claim from the reader an interest and a sympathy which they would not have obtained, had I always entertained the design to write them in my old age, and, still more, to publish them.

My mistakes are my life.

In my life I haven’t done anything worth writing about, but that’s OK. That’s why I write fiction.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.

Her one serious failing was that she could not write above love. She could not write a story with more than one important character in it, whom she thought of for the moment as herself; with love there had to be at least two important characters.

"My whole life has been a waste - I've been a failure."

Well, here I suppose is my life, or part of it, by which I would wish to be judged... poems which have been written from a sense of compulsion, a real need to explore and articulate experiences which have been important to me.

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.

If your life is worth thinking about,it is worth writing about.

I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.

Your life informs your writing.

A mans life is interesting primarily when he has failed. I well know. For its a sign that he tried to surpass himself.

لا يدّون تاريخ حياته من لم يبتلِ الحياة، فما أكتبه ليس تاريخًا لحياتي.