Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.
I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.
The only biography I read was about Al Bell, of Stax Records. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Al Bell.
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be.
To show the American woman herself off to best advantage - that has always been my aim and that is my real biography.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.
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.
The biography I've written about Wendy Wasserstein will almost invariably be different than the one anyone else would write.
My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.
I read more books for research purposes, whether it's a fictionalized biography of Johannes Gutenberg or a stack of urban fantasies.
I'm not one of those people who writes a biography or tries to figure out what kind of ice cream the character liked when he was 10.
Aaranya Kaandam' is not the biography or history of a gangster but a page out of the life of a gangster. It is like a day in his life.
The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.
Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.
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.
Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin's biography written for children.
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 would like to write my biography sometime. I love to write. I could write for weeks and weeks, maybe say nothing but just for the writing.
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.
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
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.
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.
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.
When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
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).
In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.
Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.
People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.
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.
My first biography written in '73 was not 'Journey To The Moon.' It was 'Return To Earth.' Because for me, that was the more difficult task - disappointment.
I think that I'm busy in the present, and I don't want to go back. Well, there's been an unauthorized biography, and you can't stop them. It didn't worry me.
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.
I heard Springsteen was an unhappy person. I don't know, I haven't read his biography. But a lot of people in my field should be a lot more unhappy than they are.
In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.
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.
Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.
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.
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.
A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'
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.
I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'
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.
When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'
I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.