Quotes About Biography

The Art of BiographyIs different from Geography.Geography is about Maps,But Biography is about Chaps.

The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

Well, Margaret Thatcher is perhaps the politician I have the greatest admiration for. I am reading her memoirs at the moment.

There were people who got me very involved in politics. But then there was also a book. It was a trilogy, a biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher, which made a very deep impression on me and gave me a love of political biography for the rest of my life.

The first was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a year younger than Gaius.

Playing Mark Antony in 'Rome' will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.

It's not easy to tell a life story in two-and-a-half hours flat.

Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

Samuel Beckett was saying, in a new biography, that he could remember being in the womb, which, of course, is a bit far-fetched. But he's an Irishman, so nothing's too far-fetched.

Between the fictional Laura of the books and the even more heavily fictionalized girl of the TV show, we've tended to lose sight of the fact that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a real person who was complicated and intense.

I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done.

There have been 50 or 60 books written about Empress Orchid, but none of them bothered to really examine the period in China when she lived. I was taught that she was evil; it's in all the textbooks.

If I'm playing a real-life person, I would take notes, I think that's important. For instance, when I played Rosemary Clooney, I was lucky enough to meet her; thankfully, she was still with us. And I talked with her and read her book, so when it's a real person, I want to find out everything I can.

I never watch any movies or mini series regarding the Thatcher Years.

Não deu chances ao tempo para desmoralizá-lo com mais detalhes. Com o tempo, os detalhes estragam qualquer biografia

Abyss has no biographer—', Emily Dickinson said. Truth is bottomless, and she herself almost invisible. After her death, letters from correspondents were burnt according to her instructions and soon legend replaced living fact.

I do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject.

Volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives and untimely deaths. To these mournful narratives I am about to add the Life of Richard Savage...

Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man's life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.

It is no surprise that the only woman in antiquity who could be the subject of a full-length biography is Cleopatra. Yet, unlike Alexander, whom she rivals as the theme of romance and legend, Cleopatra is known to us through overwhelmingly hostile sources. The reward of the 'good' woman in Rome was likely to be praise in stereotyped phrases; in Athens she won oblivion.