Quotes About Biography

I think if anybody is making a movie about your life something pretty incredible had to happen.

I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

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

For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.

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

What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century

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.

Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, still better known to the world as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was born on March 6, 1806, the eldest child of Edward and Mary Moulton Barrett

The correspondence, thus arranged in chronological order, forms an almost continuous record of Mrs. Browning's life, from the early days in Herefordshire to her death in Italy in 1861; but in order to complete the record, it has been thought well to add connecting links of narrative, which should serve to bind the whole together into the unity of a biography.

As for poor dear Miss Mitford's book, I was entirely upset by the biography she thought it necessary or expedient to give of me. Oh, if our friends would but put off anatomising one till after one was safely dead, and call to mind that, previously, we have nerves to be agonised and morbid brains to be driven mad!

El destino, es decir, lo que sucede y creemos que tenía que suceder, es como un tejido. Sólo que no lo hilan o tejen, como parecían creer los antiguos, unas cuantas divinidades hacendosas como las Parcas, sino que todos contribuimos a tejerlo. En este sentido es verdadero que todos hacemos la historia y todos hacemos la biografía. El destino es un poco como la biografía que, entre nosotros y los demás, hacemos de nosotros mismos.

If you consider poetry in all its fire of human becoming, at the summit of an inspiration which delivers the new world to us, what can be the use of a biography which tells us the past, the heavy past of the poet?

Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

Ray Bradbury published his first story 29 years before I was born. He established himself as an international writer long before I arrived. When my mom was nine months pregnant with me, my father read Bradbury aloud to her as I listened intently, in utero. And I later became his biographer.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.

At night, I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, 'The Round House.' But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work.

I'm an avid biography reader.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

When you're playing a real person, there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.

My character in 'Shakuntala Devi' is based on a real person, her daughter Anupama Banerjee.

When you are absorbed in a biographical subject, you get so close you don't realise the potential effect of what you say. You are trying to get at the truth.