Biographies Quotes

• I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

  Richard Attenborough

  Destiny, Views, People

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Book, Knowledge, Honest

  Henry David Thoreau (1999). “Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Biography is the only true history.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Life, My Biography

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• I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much.

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  Believe, Writing, Hands

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• People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

  Anthony Powell

  Thinking, People, Cases

  Anthony Powell (2010). “Hearing Secret Harmonies: Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time”, p.84, University of Chicago Press

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• It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

  Antonia Fraser

  Long, Historical, Gaps

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• The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesnt discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.

  Leon Edel

  Gossip, Achievement, Secret

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• The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

  George Steiner

  Majority, Oblivion, Gray

  George Steiner (1974). “In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture”, p.87, Yale University Press

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• Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

  Edmund White

  Class, People, Avenging

  Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.

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• Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

  Pamela Stephenson

  Writing, Objectivity, Perfect

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• Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

  John Arbuthnot

  Science, Terror

  Letter to Jonathan Swift, 13 Jan. 1733

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• I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

  Antonia Fraser

  Writing, Heart, Realizing

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• I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

  Jonathan Frakes

  Baseball, Writing, Literature

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• If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Sweet, Jesus, Gentleman

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• All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

  Rebecca West

  Good Life, Fiction, Study

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• I hate biographies which say, I was called to such and such an office, and he offered me so and so, and I got so and so money. I find that very tedious. The best biographies are written by other people.

  Leslie Caron

  Hate, Office, People

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• I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Years, Personal History, Interest

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.650, Library of America

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• My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life.

  Justin Hayward

  Song, Heart, People

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• For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

  Louis L'Amour

  Motivational, Reading, Numbers

  Louis L'Amour (2008). “Education of a Wandering Man”, p.25, Bantam

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• The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Autobiography, Incompleteness

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.189, Pan Macmillan

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• What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.

  Conrad Veidt

  Use, Actors, Movie Actors

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• There is properly no history, only biography.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Funny Life, History, Historical

  Essays "History" (1841)

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• Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

  Philip Guedalla

  Easter, Fiction, West

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• It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

  George Plimpton

  Editors, Pleasure, Reader

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• One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

  William Ellery Channing

  Anecdotes, Volume, Speakers

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