Biography Quotes
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..when writing a biography, you can't trust certainties. Just as you're about to pounce on something that will condemn you to a tidy answer, pooooofff! It vanishes.
Alexander Masters -
A photograph is a biography of a moment.
Art Shay
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Oftentimes, if a writer really gets her hooks into me, I'll want to read interviews, or listen to an interview, or read a literary biography or a memoir of some kind. And doing so almost always deepens my enjoyment of the author and her work.
Brad Listi -
Why should I be limited by my own biography?
Eleanor Antin -
I read every biography of Jackie Kennedy I could get my hands on.
Natalie Portman -
Your biography is not your destiny, your decisions are.
Anthony Robbins -
Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
Thomas Carlyle -
I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.
Albert Goldbarth
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A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.
Catherine Drinker Bowen -
Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.
Henry Ward Beecher -
We have the loveliest women in the world in this county and wherever there are beautiful women there will be beautiful clothes. To show the American woman herself off to best advantage-that has always been my aim and that is my real biography.
Hattie Carnegie -
When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom.
Richard Rhodes -
The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.
Allen C. Guelzo
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Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
Thomas Carlyle -
Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.
Noel Riley Fitch -
Biography is the only true history.
Thomas Carlyle -
Trees, like people, struggle for existence, and an aged tree, like an aged person, has not only a striking appearance, but an interesting biography.
Enos Mills -
I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.
John Prine