Graham Greene: A sort of Life

A Sort of Life is the first volume of autobiography by British novelist Graham Greene, first published in 1971

Paperback

Pages 157

'An autobiography is only "a sort of life"', writes Graham Green

' It may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective : it begins later and it ends prematurely. If one cannot close a book of the memoirs on the deathbed, any conclusion must be arbitrary, and I have preferred to finish this essay with the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel...

'In another sense too a book like this can only be a "sort of life", for in the course of sixty-six years I have spent almost as much time with imaginary characters as with real men and women...There is a fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of their past with irony. It is a legitimate method of self-defence...I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony.'

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