Biographies Quotes - Page 11

• Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing I have Ted, will have children but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.

  Sylvia Plath

  Children, Pain, Thinking

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.373, Anchor

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• Inthehistorian'sview biography isa kindoffrogspawn it takes ten thousand biographies to make one small history.

  Michael Holroyd

  Thousand, Ten

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• The second volume of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka . . . [is] a tangle of counter-grained and often under-sourced life stories, but reading Stach's magnificent narrative (wonderfully translated by Shelley Frisch) straight through brings death, not life, to the forefront. Stach is a compulsively readable writer. . . . [A]s in the previous volume, the prose in The Years of Insight is supple and very appealingly complex--all of which, once again, is perfectly rendered by Frisch.

  Steve Donoghue

  Reading, Epic, Years

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• The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness.

  Kate Zambreno

  Greatness, Men, Excess

  Source: therumpus.net

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• On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.

  Kate Zambreno

  Whole

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I push back against a deeply-entrenched tendency in American culture to label quickly and no longer even examine the labels that were initially stamped on a person. I don't have a problem with any of my "hyphenated" biography - I don't have any problem with that at all. The world would be a better place if our thread of hyphenation were truly embraced beyond mere naming and category.

  Fady Joudah

  Would Be, Culture, Labels

  Source: therumpus.net

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• That requires quite an imaginative leap because it's hard for me to imagine that my biography would be of much interest to anyone, and because I'm a fairly private person, the notion doesn't appeal to me.

  Debra Dean

  Would Be, Imagine, Appeals

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We're all story-telling creatures, and also I think that's the point about biography because the life is exemplary.

  Rachel Holmes

  Thinking, Stories, Life Is

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I had to imagine myself into certain aspects of [Julian Assange] character for our version of events. That involved extrapolating based on clues in his biography, his public persona, photographs, and other accounts of him by people who encountered him during that extraordinary period from 2007 to 2010 that we charted in the film [The Fifth Estate]. So, it involved a lot of research but, sadly, no contact with the man himself.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Character, Men, People

  'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug' Interview with Kam Williams, pittsburghurbanmedia.com.

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• Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.

  Rachel Holmes

  Father, Son, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

  Rachel Holmes

  Bangs, Individual, Protagonists

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.

  Rachel Holmes

  Fascination, Individual

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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

  Want, Interviews, Hook

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I haven't had a chance to pick up a good book in a long time, because I've been either reading scripts or learning them or writing them. And so, by the time the day is done, I usually just want to click on The Bachelor and fall asleep. But I gravitate toward biographies and things like that.

  Justin Theroux

  Fall, Reading, Book

  Source: www.elle.com

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• His mother's favorite, he possessed the self-confidence that told him he would achieve something worth while in life, and the ambition to do so, though for long the direction this would take remained uncertain.

  Ernest Jones

  Mother, Ambition, Self Confidence

  Ernest Jones (1961). “The life and work of Sigmund Freud”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.

  Antonio Damasio

  Reason, Enormous, Importance

  Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

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• I'd put the most money on Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson - and not just because we'll probably still be waiting for the final volume in 2017.

  David Edelstein

  Waiting, Finals, Volume

  Source: www.vulture.com

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• The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.

  Ron Chernow

  Art, Book, Character

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• Computer chips will cost about a penny. That's the cost of scrap paper. The Internet will be basically for free and it will be inside our contact lens. When we blink, we will go online. When we see somebody that we don't recognize, our contact lens will identify who they are, print out their biography in your contact lens and translate, if they're speaking Chinese, into English with subtitles as they speak.

  Michio Kaku

  Chinese, Lenses, Cost

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It's great fun to memorize somebody's biography, and then liberally play with the real facts of their life and go a step beyond reality.

  Andy Daly

  Fun, Real, Play

  "A Real Person Who Has Real Thoughts and Feelings". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. February 29, 2016.

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• Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is instructive in painting a realistic portrayal of Lincoln and his methods for accomplishing his objectives. In fact, many good political biographies are useful in learning about power, strategy, and decision-making.

  Jeffrey Pfeffer

  Team, Decision, Political

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• All of Robert Caro's biographies are exceptional, in part because of Caro's fundamental ambivalence about power. He sees its necessity and use for getting things done, even as he is often repelled by watching power at close range. His masterpiece on Robert Moses, The Power Broker, describes the evolution of Moses from idealist to pragmatist as he became one of the most powerful figures in the 20th century.

  Jeffrey Pfeffer

  Powerful, Use, Fundamentals

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Ideas, Appreciate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Like when you pick up a book and you don't realize what type of text it is - it could be an essay, a novel, a biography - and at one point you realize you don't know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people's responses vary - some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Book, Reading, Goal

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  Don DeLillo

  Hate, People, Fiction

  Don DeLillo (1989). “Americana”, p.184, Penguin

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