A Quote by Reza Aslan
My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.
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I had a checklist in my mind of the things that make a biography practical. Is the source material centralized? Is it easy to find? Are there new primary sources that no one has ever had access to? Are all the sources in English? If they're not, are they in a language that you speak? And I realized that not only is Armstrong the most important figure of Jazz in the 20th Century, but he's a perfect subject for a biography for all of these reasons. I had always loved his music and I had been fascinated in him as a personality. And that's really the key to writing a biography.
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.
The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.
Digging up new information and speculating on it isn't your primary purpose when you're writing a biography intended for young readers, unless you ?nd compelling evidence that departs from the accepted wisdom. A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record.
A new biography of Madonna came out last week, and apparently the biography lists all the men she's slept with. The book is apparently called the Manhattan Telephone Directory.
The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.
Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.
Almost any biography will have its useful suggestions for making life a success, but none better or more unfailing than the biography of Christ.
Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.
For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.
Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.
When you are playing somebody who did exist, and there is good source material on them, whether it is a biography or archives or experts, you would be stupid not to delve into them. But there is a point in the process where you leave the books alone, and instead, you focus on the script and creating your version.
A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.
The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesnt discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
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.
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