Biographies Quotes
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
My lectures were highly esteemed, but my operations less thought of, so that I am of opinion that my operations rather kept down my practice, than increased it.
I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.
It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.
I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography.
The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race.
There's been a number of erroneous biographies, articles and so on written about Billy and we both thought it would be a good idea to produce a true one.
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
You ask whether I am going over to the history of science... no, I am not as old as that.
I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn't tell it like it was.
Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
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 do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.
My reading is always about musical biographies. I have an innate interest and passion for that.
The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.
Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.
