A Quote by Wole Soyinka

I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.

Wole Soyinka

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About Biographies Fond Like Myself Writing

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Wole Soyinka
Nigerian - Novelist
Born: July 13, 1934

Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!

Simon Sebag Montefiore

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

Lady Colin Campbell

I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.

Molly Antopol

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

Susan Isaacs

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

Claire Tomalin

I grew up reading biographies on groups, and I love all that. The thing about biographies, it's the old cliché but it's true - a lot of the time these things are more about the author than they are about the group.

Stevie Jackson

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

Sheila Heti

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

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

Joan Didion

My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low.

David Lagercrantz

At a certain point, I got used to writing on demand. I developed a habit of writing like I hired myself! I also like to write about things that affect me emotionally.

Jake Holmes

When I'm writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I'm watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don't immerse myself in whatever's going on in whatever area I'm working in.

Whit Stillman

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

Jonathan Frakes

writing is about doing something very close to the bone. It's about shocking yourself. When I write, I like to make myself cry, laugh - I like to give myself an experience. I see a lot of writing out there that's very safe. But if you're not scaring yourself, why would you think that you'd be scaring anybody else? If you're not coming to a revelation about your place in the universe, why would you think anyone else would?

Kate Braverman

I like writing about what to me are like questions that I have about myself and the human condition. I find quantum physics fascinating, so I like to write about that, and I like things that make me laugh.