Quotes About Biography

Whether or not you've studied art history, you may have heard some of Vasari's stories—part historical urban legend, part morality tale, his great collective biography spun visual aphorisms that endure to this day.

Dati biografici: io sono ancora di quelli che credono, con Croce, che di un autore contano solo le opere. (Quando contano, naturalmente.) Perciò dati biografici non ne do, o li do falsi, o comunque cerco sempre di cambiarli da una volta all'altra. Mi chieda pure quel che vuol sapere, e Glielo dirò. Ma non Le dirò mai la verità, di questo può star sicura. Lettera a Germana Pescio Bottino, 9 giugno 1964

Only one who takes over his own life history can see in it the realization of his self. Responsibility to take over one's own biography means to get clear about who one wants to be.

At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson. Here I work for a guy who brings a teddy bear to work and considers it a management innovation.

The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer's view is always something to keep in mind.

How horribly dull. I could never have been a biographer. Don't you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?" "Not in the stories you have told the world so far.

I'm a storyteller." "I am a biographer.

That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.

T he name of the father of Genghis Khan is a word which can not be pronounced exactly in English. It sounded something like this, Yezonkai Behadr,

Mabel Todd took the offensive with her expanded edition of the Dickinson letters. Her preface presented it as the first book ever issued about Emily Dickinson, prepared at the requests of the poet's brother and sister: Austin Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson 'and I' collected letters 'which they entrusted to me' to edit and publish. At a stroke, this authorised editor displaced an unauthorised niece.

The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England…. With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich's life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

There is no way to write a biography of Shostakovich without relying on hearsay and relaying the memories of people who have many private reasons to fabricate, mislead, and revise.

As one Shostakovich biographer put it, "Testimony is a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich. It just isn't a genuine one.

Reconstructing a Soviet life is often difficult. Many of the details of Shostakovich's youth we know only because his aunt Nadejda Galli-Shohat collaborated on a biography years later, against his wishes. She is not an entirely reliable source; an American interviewer called her "one of those wonderfully frank Russians who can drop into fantasy as easily as most of us find our way into the subway.

What makes journalist so fascinating, and biography so interesting [is] the struggle to answer that single question: 'What's he like?

Virginia Woolf pointed out in her classic essay 'The Art of Biography' (1938)

She told all the would-be biographers, exactly as he would have, "Read the work. Forget the life.

And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats' memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment, — must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, Keats himself and his poetry?

We're all subjective beings and trapped in our own realities and our own biographical stories and physical bodies and our histories - and that's the only way we can experience the world.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!