Top 479 Biography Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

I wouldn't want to write a biography of anyone. I'd feel too inhibited by the facts and too much pressure to do the subject's life justice.

I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs. To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.

I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality.

The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

I was reading William Shawcross's biography of the Queen Mother, dressed in my witch outfit! And you know what? It was a really good mix; it was a therapeutic mix.

Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.

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.

I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

Somebody approached me about writing a biography on me, I told them they were too late.

I loved Victoria Glendinning's bio of Vita Sackville-West. I also loved Michael Holroyd's immense biography of Lytton Strachey.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.

What's weird is that anybody can write anything, and once it goes online, it's permanent. My very first biography on IMDb, which was written by a manager I had at the time, was not true.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

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

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.

Your biography becomes your biology.

The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.

We're artists. We cry out to be exploited on some level. Write a dissertation on my work. Write a biography about me.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.

I got very keen on biography because I wanted to change it. I wanted to stretch the form. I think of it as a way of capturing souls.

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.

I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about.

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?

I first wrote a biography of Thomas Carlyle, and it turned out I loved writing biographies and had a talent for it. I believed I had a contribution to make.

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

Most of society thinks that biography is destiny, that the past equals the future, and of course it does if you live there...but what we really have to remind ourselves is that decision is the ultimate power.

A children's biography doesn't have to be comprehensive, and it doesn't have to be definitive. It does have to be accurate, to the extent that's possible. And most of all, it has to be a piece of literature, a compelling read. I want the reader to discover the joy of reading.

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

The most frequent thing people said to me about Princess Diana when I was conducting interviews for my biography was that she could create a circle of intimacy in the middle of a crowd.

I was kind of relieved with the way the book [The Proud Highway] came out. It's beyond an autobiography or a biography. I never knew what was going to come up next.

Once you choose to run for president of the United States and succeed, your earlier life, your biography, is a major part of American history.

I was excited when I first got the call, when I heard BBC Four were making a biography and they were interested in me being a part of it.

And if Henry Higgins is not the most reprehensible character ever written for the stage, that's only because somewhere, somehow, someone is composing a musical biography of Ronald Reagan

Live your life as if you are writing your Biography.

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.

I can't say I wasn't warned. Alarms started clanging the day I signed to write 'His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra' (Bantam Books, 1986).

A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

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.