Quotes About Biography

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.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, monachism of the Hermit Anthony, the Reformation of Luther, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, abolition of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.

They (animals) are not just living things; they are beings with lives... that makes all the difference in the world...next time you are outside...notice the first bird you see…you are beholding a unique individual with personality traits, an emotional profile, and a library of knowledge built on experience…what you are witnessing is not just biology, but a biography.

I'd prefer people read about Churchill and how he wasn't overwhelmed by Nazi Germany. Amazing; that the morale of a country rested on one person's shoulders. Extraordinary people carried that country through its darkest hours; truly inspirational. I suppose that's my theme. Whether it's a biography or a movie; whether it's fictional or true, I'm inspired by people doing great things.

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.

When I hear a politician speak biographically, I never know what's part of the campaign biography narrative that's been carefully crafted.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

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 read every biography [of Jackie Kennedy] I could get my hands on.

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

All of our theology must eventually become biography.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

I read Warren Zevon's bizarre biography, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." His wife, Crystal Zevon, posthumously published a journal he wrote and some interviews with ex-band members. Like [Keith] Richards's book "Life," it's brutally honest.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

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.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.

I feel like real thoughts and emotions involve the whole being. And they also outstrip little personal quirks, and they outstrip biography. You end up on a really special, universal, shared terrain in those experiences. I think it's available to absolutely every single thing made of flesh and blood.

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.

Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation-the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west.

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.

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

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.

Any good biography has to got to lead you to the work. Many biographers have started out in love with their subjects and ended up hating them.

Inthehistorian'sview biography isa kindoffrogspawn it takes ten thousand biographies to make one small history.

There is no history; only biography.

if I believed that the choice lay between a sacrifice of the completest order of biography and that of the inviolability of private epistolary correspondence, I could not hesitate for a moment. I would keep the old and precious privacy,-the inestimable right of every one who has a friend and can write to him, - I would keep our written confidence from being made biographical material, as anxiously as I would keep our spoken conversation from being noted down for the good of society.

All Philosophy is Biography

We're all story-telling creatures, and also I think that's the point about biography because the life is exemplary.

Find a great role model, perhaps someone who struggled and only really succeeded when older. Their biography and what they've done differently from you will help you. If such a person is willing to mentor you or at least allow you to work around them, great.