A Quote by Todd Gitlin

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

Todd Gitlin

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Biography History Insisted Intersection Mills Proper Subject

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Todd Gitlin
American - Novelist

When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel."

Nicholas Meyer

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

I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.

Carolyn Wells

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.

Terry Teachout

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

H. W. Brands

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.

Rachel Holmes

By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, he may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal.

Constantine Manos

The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, if you look at its website, it basically deals with commercial disputes, it's not allowed to deal with matters involving children, it's not allowed to deal with criminal matters, it's subject to judicial review, it's subject to the Human Rights Act, it's subject to the Children's Act, and it's completely proper and right that it should be subject to all those things.

Sadakat Kadri

I like historical pieces. History was my favorite subject in school, it was the only subject I excelled in. I love the idea of history and the idea that we may have the opportunity to learn from our past mistakes.

Cary Elwes

The soul of the world is in the whole world, and is everywhere so adapted to matter that, at each place, it produces the proper subject and causes the proper actions.

Giordano Bruno

If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.

Archibald Geikie

Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history.

Russell Baker

I do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject.

Iris Origo

Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company; it should only be treated among a very few people of learning, for mutual instruction. It is too awful and respectable a subject to become a familiar one.

Lord Chesterfield

All history is biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I try to ?nd clues in the documented record - from the subject's own testimony, from the testimony of other people. When you're writing a biography, you're trying to understand your subject in the same way that you try to understand one of your friends, and that effort at understanding is always very imperfect.

Russell Freedman

A Quote by Todd Gitlin

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