Quotes About Biography

Biography," observed Oscar Wilde, "lends to death a new terror.

At one point he put his nose close to a volume called Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Hodge.

I would like to do a music person's story, a bio. I've wanted to do Aaliyah forever. But I don't want it to always be like, 'I'm singing again in a movie.'

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.

We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare—Susanna in May 1583 and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in early February 1585—but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple's relationship—whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting.

The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.

Science is deeply embedded in modern civilization—but the average citizen does not understand the scientific life or how scientific discoveries are made. Neither is it generally understood that scientific discovery is never a neat story. Writing about a life in science is thus by definition particularly onerous. The biographer in this case has to understand not only the life but also the science.

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.

I was fortunate enough to be able to keep my real name and build a whole bio around Mickie James.

I wanted to be as authentic as possible because, first of all, Jean Shrimpton is still alive. And, she's interesting enough to be played accurately. I didn't need to add things.

The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.

Another reason that shame is so difficult to talk about is vocabulary. We often use the terms embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and shame interchangeably, when in reality these experiences are very different in terms of biology, biography, behavior, and self-talk, and they lead to radically different outcomes.

It was said that his decision to have his papers burnt was a defence against biographers. He had read a life of one of the archbishops of Dublin, Dr William Walsh, and thought it a travesty of the man he had known. No one would do that to him; no one would analyse the mind and heart of Daniel Mannix. It would be bad enough if they got it wrong. And for him, it might have been almost as bad if they got it right.

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.

I'm a huge Crowley fan, I've always been. I tried to make a movie on his life a few years ago, but we didn't manage to put it together.

'Jim Thorpe - All American' influenced me as a young kid.

Natalie S. Bober. A Restless Spirit: The Story of Robert Frost. Henry Holt: New York, 1998

Robert T. Richardson, Jr. Henry Thoreau, A Life of the Mind. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1986

Kathleen Barry. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. First Books: Bloomington, IN, 2000

Robert Caro, author of the (yet) unfinished monumental biography of Lyndon Baynes Johnson, has noted, "The importance of a sense of place is commonly accepted in the world of fiction. I wish that were also true about biography and history.

Jeffrey Meyers' Modigliani: A Life,

I once wrote a biography of Albert Einstein, called Einstein's Cosmos, and had to delve into the minute details of his private life. I had known that Einstein's youngest son was afflicted with schizophrenia, but did not realize the enormous emotional toll that it had taken on the great scientist's life.

M]an has always harbored the desire to rewrite his own biography, to change the past, to wipe out tracks, both his own and other's. (p.130)

Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?