"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)

"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."
— John Berger

"You must have me confused with myself"
— Michael Palmer (The Promises of Glass)

"... A man's wife can hold him devilish uneasy, if she begins to scold and fret, and perplex him, at a time when he has a full load for a railroad car on his mind already."
— David Crockett

"Under the seams runs the pain."
— Anne Carson

"When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain. "
— Anne Carson

"Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."
— Anne Carson

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)

"I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.
Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation."
— Mark E. Smith (Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith)

"I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places."
— Kelly Cherry (Exiled Heart: A Meditative Autobiography)