Quotes About Biography

At the end of the book you know Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant

I always wondered why there weren't any films about Cesar Chavez. There are movies about other civil rights leaders in this country, but why not Chavez?

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?

So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

I love throwing myself into people who actually lived. It gives me a lot to research and a lot to know.

Siamese twins are interesting because they are the only people who can write a biography and an autobiography at the same time.

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

Always life your life with your biography in mind. Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a magnificent reason, but at the very least you'll be living grandly.

People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.

The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.

What you say, Nick, strengthens my contention that only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by exact definition. Biography and autobiography are forced to attempt exact definition. In doing so truth goes astray. The novelist is more serious—if that is the word.

I believe that a biography is more effectual than any other kind of literature in turning the mind into a new channel, and causing it to take an interest in the concerns of others rather than its own. GEORGE HAMILTON-GORDON, 5th EARL of ABERDEEN

The biographer's real business - if it is not too arrogant to say so - is simply this: to bring the dead to life.

Mike Tyson's life is one of the most amazing American stories.

I guess anyone would be nervous to give your life over to someone to make a film about it.

ALSO BY JOHN OLLER Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew An All-American Murder American Queen: The Rise and Fall of Kate Chase Sprague—Civil War "Belle of the North" and Gilded Age Woman of Scandal

Of all the books which can be put into your hands, those which relate the labors and suffering of good men are the most interesting and instructive.

Începuturile noastre conteaz?, desigur; dar pasul decisiv spre noi înÈ™ine nu-l facem decât atunci când nu mai avem origini, când biografia noastr? e la fel de puÈ›in? ca a lui Dumnezeu...

Von Natur aus bin ich jedem Unternehmen gegenüber abweisend, daß ich, um mich zu einem solchen zu entschließen, zuvor in einer Biographie von Alexander oder Dschingis-Khan blättern muss.

Bach was quarrelsome, litigious, self-serving, greedy for titles and honors, etc. So what! A musicologist listing the cantatas whose theme is death has remarked that no mortal ever had such a nostalgia for it. Which is all that counts. The rest has to do with biography.

The more history approaches to biography the more interest it excites.

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.

The only biography I read was about Al Bell, of Stax Records. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Al Bell.