Quotes About Biography

Writing a biography is not a love affair. It's not a marriage. It's a job, it's a piece of work.

Of course I went to medical school strongly influenced by my father, I mean the family reason, and secondly I read the biography of Hideyo Noguchi who was the very interesting doctor, who went to the United States in his 20s and become professor in the Rockefeller Institute.

By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life.

There is also present in every human being, in everyone's biography-although sometimes harrowing cases of systematic neglect, present in the matter of absence, so if longing for that which never was there then too, deeply suspect, should have been.

biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

It is one of the ironies of biographical art that some details are more relevant than others, and many details have no relevance at all.

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

A biography is like a mini-series with different twists and turns, ups and downs. Others will rewrite it for you when you forget to sign on the last page.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

Biographers are not usually as explicit as philosophers such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Austin, or Moore on questions of the existence of an essential self, the extent to which a life can be lived according to a philosophical system, or the relation between acts and emotions. That is not their job – unless they are writing the Life of a philosopher. But biography is bound to reflect changing and conflicting concepts about

we still expect a biography to give an account of a person's life, and times too.

creativity and imagination are as crucial to the life writing project as they are to fiction and poetry. We'll explore, and attempt, both autobiography and biography in Part 4, and in activities you'll be able to form your writing into poetry and/or prose.

I like vampires, tuberculosis, anything to do with blood. Then I read a biography of Rasputin and found out he'd had this daughter who had become a famous lion tamer and been billed as the daughter of the mad monk who was able to hypnotize animals with her eyes. It gave me a vision.

My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.

For 'Rosa Luxemburg,' I read everything by and about her, but the first time I was stuck in that corset, I got an understanding of her that I'd never had before.

When I first studied Billie Holiday's life story years ago, I admit that I was quite judgmental.

No biographical subject is ever on hold with the orthodontist. If there's a dry spell, it's your job to curtail or eliminate it.

In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write an English that positively sings.

I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

Bob Hope was an entertainment colossus, shrewd and influential well beyond show business. Richard Zoglin's biography captures it all--the public and private Hope.

Peter Ackroyd