Quotes About Biography

If it's a role like this one, an actual live person, a legend, there's lots of material laid out.

If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don't know what was going on in the person's mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

No one needs to be a victim of their own biography." Or, as Carl Jung puts it, "I am not what has happened to me, I am what I choose to become." PRINCIPLE #3: LIFE IS ORGANIC In my experience, very few people in middle age or beyond correctly anticipated the lives they have actually led.

Quality and consistency of conjecture are one good measure of the ambition and the inwardness of any literary biography. The biographer is master of the archive, but also and equally master of the subjunctive mood, of un-certainty, of non-factuality.

he had died as late as the New Year of 1939, he would, as Paul Addison says, 'perhaps be remembered today as the most illustrious and interesting failure in twentieth-century British politics'. Certainly until his apotheosis he was more often seen as an 'interesting failure' than as the subject for a study in greatness.

Undoubtedly his greatest contributions were in the field of psychohistory. Seldon found the field little more than a set of vague axioms; he left it a profound statistical science.… … The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the biography

The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the biography written by Gaal Dornick who, as a young man, met Seldon two years before the great mathematician's death. The story of the meeting …

Biography is the only true history.

One anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

History is: Fables agreed upon - Voltaire The biography of a few stout and earnest persons - Ralph Waldo Emerson A vast Mississippi of falsehood - Matthew Arnold A confused heap of facts - Lord Chesterfield A cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man -

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell.

Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don't measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and - outside of this material - there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him.

Generally my instinct is to not do biographical movies. I want to build characters and not be locked into playing a part in history.

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.

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.

read a biography of Mohammed, especially the one by Essad Bey.

If you are keenly interested in studying the strange power which gives potency to persistence, read a biography of Mohammed, especially the one by Essad Bey.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now

It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one — none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance — to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.