Biographies Quotes - Page 9

• 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

  Women, Eight, Careers

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• if I believed that the choice lay between a sacrifice of the completest order of biography and that of the inviolability of private epistolary correspondence, I could not hesitate for a moment. I would keep the old and precious privacy,-the inestimable right of every one who has a friend and can write to him, - I would keep our written confidence from being made biographical material, as anxiously as I would keep our spoken conversation from being noted down for the good of society.

  Harriet Martineau

  Writing, Sacrifice, Order

  Harriet Martineau (1845). “Life in the Sick-room: Essays”, p.92

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• Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.

  Janet Malcolm

  Taken, Thinking, Views

  Janet Malcolm (2011). “Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath And Ted Hughes”, p.12, Granta Books

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• I have always liked reading biographies. It is the ideal literary genre for someone too prim, like me, to acknowledge a gossipy interest in the living - don't you hate gossips, aren't they too awful? - but avid for any nuggets from the private lives of the dead because that is perfectly respectable, an altogether worthy and informative way of spending one's time.

  Jill Tweedie

  Hate, Reading, Avid

  Jill Tweedie (1980). “It's only me: pieces from a column”, Robson Books Limited

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• Occasionally a single anecdote opens a character; biography has its comparative anatomy, and a saying or a sentiment enables the skilful hand to construct the skeleton.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Character, Skeletons, Hands

  Robert Aris Willmott (1858). “Summer Time in the Country”, p.44

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• biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

  Phyllis Rose

  Two, Littles, Rooms

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• I read Warren Zevon's bizarre biography, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." His wife, Crystal Zevon, posthumously published a journal he wrote and some interviews with ex-band members. Like [Keith] Richards's book "Life," it's brutally honest.

  Dave Barry

  Book, Sleep, Wife

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• My first biography written in '73 was not 'Journey To The Moon.' It was 'Return To Earth.' Because for me, that was the more difficult task - disappointment.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Disappointment, Moon, Journey

  "People Share Moon Landing Memories On YouTube Channel". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Scott Simon, www.npr.org. July 19, 2014.

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• Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human. . . . Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments.

  Robert Rosenberg

  Character, Accomplishment, Understanding

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• If it had taught them nothing else, twenty years of living past high school had taught them self-preservation. ... No one was going to risk putting his ego on the line; they would come prepared with dates, flattering clothes, and a well-rehearsed, carefully edited biography. They would all be kind to each other. High school was enough torture for one lifetime.

  Sharyn McCrumb

  School, Past, Self

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• I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

  Hilary Mantel

  Rivals, Historian

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• I am a total sucker for an actor's autobiography/biography. I have probably read most of them.

  Kate Fleetwood

  Actors, Autobiography, Sucker

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• I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.

  Hilary Mantel

  Reading, Thinking, Study

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  Writing, Thinking, Should

  Penelope Fitzgerald (2008). “So I have thought of you: the letters of Penelope Fitzgerald”, Fourth Estate (GB)

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• 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

  Beautiful, Real, Clothes

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• Unfortunately, I'm not a history buff. I don't read biographies, except of some of those writers whom I've collected over the years - particularly Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller, people like Charles Bukowski and John Fante and David Foster Wallace.

  John Larroquette

  Years, People, Beckett

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The biography I've written about Wendy Wasserstein will almost invariably be different than the one anyone else would write.

  Julie Salamon

  Writing, Different, Wendy

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• I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Opposites, Needs, Finishing

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• I will read biographies or autobiographies while I'm writing, but mostly I put books in a to-read queue, like Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Outline."

  David Duchovny

  Book, Writing, Queues

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

  John Legend

  Kings, Kids, Rights

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• I was influenced at an early age by Gandhi, and I have read many biographies of him. I have been greatly influenced in the last twenty years by Mandela. It is amazing that he has managed to keep such a balance, that he came out of prison after such a long time as a rounded, holistic person who could reach difficult accommodations with generosity.

  Mary Robinson

  Years, Long, Generosity

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• I love reading. I'm very much into history, novels, biographies and I have a wide range of thrillers.

  Bruno Tonioli

  Reading, Range, Thrillers

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• Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

  Jane Jacobs

  War, Ideas, People

  Interview with James Kunstler for Metropolis Magazine, March 2001.

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• I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.

  Richard Lewis

  Book, Fiction, Ifs

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• I read a lot by female psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who wrote prominent biographies of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud because she studied with all of them. She had this unbelievable insight into contemporary psychoanalysis. What is so interesting is that she wrote her life, and she knew that her life would be about these men, and it didn't stop her from leading an incredibly successful academic career. But her strange self-awareness that she was going to bookmark these men's lives is really interesting to me.

  Laura Marling

  Successful, Men, Careers

  Source: www.mtv.com

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