Biographies Quotes - Page 5

• More than a needed biography of Ehrenburg . . . Tangled Loyalties is a contribution of much significance to our understanding of the history of Russia in Stalin's time and of her relations with the West.

  Robert C. Tucker

  Loyalty, Russia, Tangled

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• I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

  Robert Caro

  Believe, Writing, Trying

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• I feel I have to live a little longer before I write a sequel to my auto biography which covers my experiences up until October 1991.

  Holly Johnson

  Writing, Littles, October

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• A musician's biography is written wherever he performs; everybody hears what he is playing.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Music, Musician, Written

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• If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Spring, Real, Book

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• I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.

  Robert Caro

  Zero, Book, Writing

  "Robert Caro: a life with LBJ and the pursuit of power" by Chris McGreal, www.theguardian.com. June 09, 2012.

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• A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography, Max gives us the man, his work, and his times-the niceties of which (so complicated, so exquisitely intertwined) Max articulates with, well, Wallace-like lucidity and wit. Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room.

  Blake Bailey

  Men, Giving, Touching

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• Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

  Clara Barton

  Writing, Ill, Wells

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• The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

  Harold Acton

  Two, Lasts, Fiction

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• It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.

  Allan Massie

  Mother, Book, Son

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• The Revival of 1859 helped to lay the foundations of the modern international and interdenominational missionary structureEvery revival of religion in the homelands is felt within a decade in the foreign mission-fields, and the records of missionary enterprises and the pages of missionary biography following I860 are full of clearest evidence of the stimulating effect of the Revival throughout the world.

  J. Edwin Orr

  Foundation, Missionary, Records

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• I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.

  Pierre Boulez

  Firsts, Composer

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• There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.

  Flannery O'Connor

  House, Yards, Reason

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.290, Macmillan

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• The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.

  Anne Michaels

  Rain, Past, Names

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.15, A&C Black

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• Biographies of British pop celebrities are terrible.

  Mick Jagger

  British, Pops, Terrible

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• I would recommend you watch the movie 'Jobs' starring Ashton Kutcher, if you don't have time to read Jobs's biography.

  Gene Simmons

  Inspirational, Jobs, Watches

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• I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.

  Dorothy Hodgkin

  Science, Crystals, Chemistry

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• You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

  Robert Caro

  Guy, Political, Use

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• Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Book, Writing, Curiosity

  "A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography". Book by Evelyn Waugh, 1964.

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• I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.

  David Maraniss

  Writing, People, Perspective

  Interview with Carlos J. Queirós, www.aarp.org. April, 2006.

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• A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Writing

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2012). “Hyperion”, p.57, Jazzybee Verlag

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• ...learning chiefly in mathematical sciences can so swallow up and fix one's thought, as to possess it entirely for some time; but when that amusement is over, nature will return, and be where it was, being rather diverted than overcome by such speculations.

  Gilbert Burnet

  Science, Overcoming, Amusement

  Gilbert Burnet (1745). “An Exposition of the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England”, p.176

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• In trying to evaluate Hopkins' unique contribution to biochemistry it may perhaps be said that he alone amongst his contemporaries succeeded in formulating the subject. Among others whose several achievements in their own fields may have surpassed his, no one has ever attempted to unify and correlate biochemical knowledge so as to form a comprehensible picture of the cell and its relation to life, reproduction and function.

  Marjory Stephenson

  Science, Unique, Cells

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• One of the grandest figures that ever frequented Eastern Yorkshire was William Smith, the distinguished Father of English Geology. My boyish reminiscence of the old engineer, as he sketched a triangle on the flags of our yard, and taught me how to measure it, is very vivid. The drab knee-breeches and grey worsted stockings, the deep waistcoat, with its pockets well furnished with snuff-of which ample quantities continually disappeared within the finely chiselled nostril-and the dark coat with its rounded outline and somewhat quakerish cut, are all clearly present to my memory.

  William Crawford Williamson

  Memories, Father, Science

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• This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Science, Oxygen, Claims

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