"An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory"
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Autobiography is supposed to be the genre of candor; Franklin P. Jones treats it as the genre of selective amnesia. The jab lands because it turns a supposedly internal flaw into an external scapegoat. It is never that the writer was petty, cruel, or cowardly - it is that memory, that conveniently unreliable bureaucrat, misplaced the incriminating files. Jones is needling the oldest PR move in publishing: self-mythmaking disguised as self-reflection.
The line works on two levels. First, it punctures the moral halo we grant people who "tell their own story". Autobiographies often arrive pre-sanitized, heavy on hardship, light on harm done to others. Jones implies the only "bad" that leaks through is accidental: a misremembered date, a contradiction, a vanity too obvious to edit out. Second, it quietly accuses the reader of complicity. We buy these books hoping for a coherent hero narrative, and we reward the version of honesty that still flatters its author.
Context matters: as a journalist writing in a century when celebrity profiles, political memoirs, and corporate biographies increasingly blurred into managed narratives, Jones understood that reputation is a product. His humor is newsroom-honed: dry, economical, and suspicious of anyone who controls their own copy. In a single sentence, he sketches autobiography as less confession than alibi - not the truth of a life, but the most marketable recollection of it.
The line works on two levels. First, it punctures the moral halo we grant people who "tell their own story". Autobiographies often arrive pre-sanitized, heavy on hardship, light on harm done to others. Jones implies the only "bad" that leaks through is accidental: a misremembered date, a contradiction, a vanity too obvious to edit out. Second, it quietly accuses the reader of complicity. We buy these books hoping for a coherent hero narrative, and we reward the version of honesty that still flatters its author.
Context matters: as a journalist writing in a century when celebrity profiles, political memoirs, and corporate biographies increasingly blurred into managed narratives, Jones understood that reputation is a product. His humor is newsroom-honed: dry, economical, and suspicious of anyone who controls their own copy. In a single sentence, he sketches autobiography as less confession than alibi - not the truth of a life, but the most marketable recollection of it.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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