An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

-Crisp, Quentin
  The Naked Civil Servant, ch.29.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life'öit may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

-Greene, (Henry) Graham
A Sort of Life, preface.

The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position.On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of societyas one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth.On the other hand, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our own lives how impossible that is.

-Lewontin, Richard Charles
  'Sex, Lies, and Social Science', in the NewYork Review of Books, 20  Apr.

Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent; which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the dead leaves and throughthemould, thrusts a scaled bud through years of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free andöwe are aliveöwe are flowering for our moment upon the earth? This is the moment which after all, we live foröthe moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal.

-Beauchamp
   Journal entry,  Apr.

If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian† I shall always come back to rest in the shadow of the blue mountains, in the heart of this vast, deserted continent which gave me birth.

-Melba, Dame Nellie real name Helen Mitchell
  Melodies and Memories, ch.1.

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.

-Roth, Philip Milton
  Of critics. Deception,'Philip'.

What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self- understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.

-Warren, Robert Penn
  In the NewYorkTimes,12 May.

Only when onehas lost all curiosity has onereached the age to write an autobiography.

-Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn
  A Little Learning, opening words.