Biographies Quotes - Page 20

• I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?

  Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Cancer, Writing, Character

  7 Copy quote

• Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Admirable, Autobiography, Omelets

  7 Copy quote

• No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Art, Character, Men

  Thomas Carlyle (1839). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays”, p.2

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

  Simone Weil

  Stress, Writing, Ends

  9 Copy quote

• When I read biographies, I'm only interested in the first few chapters. I'm not interested in when people become successful. I'm interested in what made them successful.

  Michael Eisner

  Successful, People, Firsts

  "Michael Eisner: What I've Learned" by cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. March 18, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

  Norman Spinrad

  Lying, Writing, Would Be

  4 Copy quote

• Two Drink Mike enjoys dancing and knows a magic trick. Whereas, No Drink Mike enjoys biographies, and has serious opinions on wildlife. And Five Drink Mike... dances with wildlife.

  Mike Birbiglia

  Funny, Humor, Two

  4 Copy quote

• A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

  Robert Dessaix

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.

  Albert Goldbarth

  Meaningful, Reading, Writing

  Source: muse.jhu.edu

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'd prefer people read about Churchill and how he wasn't overwhelmed by Nazi Germany. Amazing; that the morale of a country rested on one person's shoulders. Extraordinary people carried that country through its darkest hours; truly inspirational. I suppose that's my theme. Whether it's a biography or a movie; whether it's fictional or true, I'm inspired by people doing great things.

  Larry Ellison

  Inspirational, Country, People

  5 Copy quote

• I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.

  Henry Fairfield Osborn

  Character, Science, Pride

  6 Copy quote

• As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts.

  Dan Brown

  Sound, Fiction, Research

  4 Copy quote

• An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - 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.

  Graham Greene

  Errors, May, Facts

  1971 A Sort of Life, preface.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I read a lot. I especially read memoirs and biographies. It's very helpful when you're thinking about what's possible and what exists in human behavior; if it exists out there then it can exist on the stage. I really try to go to a lot of concerts. A lot of live events. I just try to keep my ears really, really open.

  Jeanine Tesori

  Thinking, Trying, Events

  "Composer Jeanine Tesori on Her Artistic Process and Rewarding Female Ambition". Interview with Victoria Myers, www.indiewire.com. March 27, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• You have to get inside the people you are writing about. You have to go below the surface. And that's to a very large degree what all writers are doing - they're trying to get below the surface. Whether it's in fiction or poetry or writing history and biography. Some people make that possible because they write wonderful letters and diaries. And you have to sort of go where the material is.

  David McCullough

  Writing, People, Trying

  Source: belmontvision.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.

  David McCullough

  Book, Tests, Novel

  Source: belmontvision.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance.

  T.C. Boyle

  Writing, Wife, Want

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I usually have Kafka biography in my bathroom. It's a book I can open at random and feel interested in immediately. It's really funny. With this book, since I'm opening it at random and immediately interested, I don't feel the need to read more than I want to read, in that there's not, like, a plot that leads me along. So I can stop whenever.

  Tao Lin

  Book, Plot, Needs

  4 Copy quote

• [Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Delight, Way

  5 Copy quote

• The reason I moved to Nashville was because I was reading biographies of a lot of my country music heroes, and I thought it would be better to actually go where the history was, as opposed to just reading about it.

  Lindi Ortega

  Country, Reading, Hero

  4 Copy quote

• The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: “The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries."

  Kate Zambreno

  Girl, Writing, Greatness

  "The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kate Zambreno". Interview with Gina Frangello, therumpus.net. November 18, 2012.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• in the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Night, Skeletons, Skins

  5 Copy quote

• Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body - you thoughts, your actions, your food - the thing you feed your life.

  Caroline Myss

  Choices, Body, Action

  31 Copy quote

• Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

  Tom Stoppard

  Real, Real Life, Mesh

  9 Copy quote

• A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.

  H. G. Wells

  Made, Should, Demonstration

  H. G. Wells (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of H. G. Wells”, p.16701, Delphi Classics

  10 Copy quote

  Show source