A Quote by Jane Ridley

Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it's familiar stuff and has all been written about before.

Jane Ridley

Quote Topics

About Been Before Biography Cradle Dead Doldrums Familiar Grave Pages Political Politics Read Stuff Wants Written

Quote Author

Jane Ridley
English - Historian
Born: May 15, 1953

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

William Golding

Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.

Suzan-Lori Parks

Our motto is 'from cradle to grave.' Unwanted babies are delivered to us through our cradle programme, where we work to find new homes for them for parents desiring children. In addition to our healthcare programmes, we also have a programme for burying the dead, meeting all the necessary expenses for those who are unable to do so.

Abdul Sattar Edhi

Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.

William McDonough

At school, I would read the City pages before I read the sports pages.

Lloyd Dorfman

The left promises abortion rights and cradle to the grave protection, so the trick is to make it to the cradle.

Dennis Miller

I've been offered political shows before, and I don't know anything about politics and I feel uncomfortable making political opinions - there's consequences to them. I often think I'm wrong, so I really don't like getting in political or religious discussions because of the giant possibility that I might be wrong.

Norm MacDonald

Even if security from the cradle to the grave could eliminate [all] the risks of life, it would [still] be a dead hand on the creative spirit of the American people.

Herbert Hoover

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

Jorge Luis Borges

People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.

Cormac McCarthy

It's hard enough condensing 500 pages into a movie, and it would have been impossible to condense 800.

Taylor Lautner

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

I can't define myself as a political writer - I don't think I've earned it, and I don't function as a political writer in the way that many of the writers I admire do. It's not simply a question of context, of where I'm writing from - there is much in American society that urgently needs to be written about. I think your work is always engaged with politics in the looser sense of the word - and that looseness is itself a kind of privilege - because politics and culture are evidently intertwined.

Katie Kitamura

I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.

Stephen Dobyns

I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, 'Twilight,' also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families - real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.