My Biography Quotes

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

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting. ~ Eleanor Catton

I don't think my writing has much to do with my age. For me, my biography is more about what I was reading at what age. It's more of an intellectual thing of wanting to be free to write and think without being too bound by categorisation. I don't think I'm made for these times; I feel more like an old-fashioned writer. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs. To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness. ~ Thomas McGuane

Biography should be written by an acute enemy. ~ Arthur Balfour

I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world. ~ Tennessee Williams

When I'm dead, somebody can write my biography. I wrote a national hymn, an anthem, which I don't want to present to that country. But I have a deal with my wife - when I'm dead, she should offer it, because then I'm safe. ~ Giorgio Moroder

The girl in the red coat would remain the the sweet but sore point in my biography: the promise never kept; the mystery that would always remain a mystery. And yet, I regretted nothing. Someday it would be less painful. Someday my heart would be light again. I had to only let it happen. ~ Nicolas Barreau

I can find my biography in every fable that I read. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If my clone writes my biography, is it really an autobiography? ~ Jarod Kintz

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen. ~ Roman Payne

No-one has the right to terminate a person's life with a gun, a knife, or a makutu (spell). ~ Theresa Sjoquist

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me. ~ Jane Campion

The creative person should have no other biography than his works. ~ B. Traven

Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, "No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices." It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply. ~ Adam Alter

Neither is a memoir the same as a biography, which aims for the most objective, factual account of a life. A memoir, as I understand it, makes no pretense of denying its subjectivity. Its matter is one person's memory, and memory by nature is selective and colored by emotion. Others who participated in the events I describe will no doubt remember some details differently, though I hope we would agree on the essential truths. I have taken no liberties with the past as I remember it, used no fictional devices beyond reconstructing conversations from memory. I have not blended characters, or bent chronology to convenience. And yet I have tried to tell a good story. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography. ~ William Ellery Channing

She hands me an ornament of The Virgin Mary. "Pray to the Holy Mary, Mother of God!" I notice she has a gold chain round her neck. It has the holy cross and a shamrock ~ Suzy Davies

I'm not the person who reading a ppl's biography in order to get a moral lesson. ~ Ryzal Ibrahim

I'm not a very good writer. But I'm a HELLUVA re-writer. ~ Laini Giles

Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity - but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards ... It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own? ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Elder Maxwell on Wintry Doctrines
Elder Maxwell said that "if we are serious about our discipleship Jesus will eventually request each of us to do those very things which are most difficult for us to do."
This was what he came to call the wintry doctrine at the funeral of a young father in 1996 he put it this way "There are in the gospel warm and cuddly doctrines and then there are some that are just outright wintry doctrines… one of them frankly is that we cannot approach real consecration without passing through appropriate clinical experiences because we don't achieve consecration in the abstract. … sometimes therefore the best people have the worst experiences… because they are the most ready to learn." (Bruce C. Hafen, The Story of A Disciple's Life: Preparing the Biography of Neal A. Maxwell, p. 14) ~ Neal A. Maxwell

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. ~ William James

In Jazz, like in America, the group works together toward a common cause with lots of room left for each individual to shine. ~ Richie Gerber

She could do anything with dynamite, except eat it. ~ Clare Mulley

There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition. ~ Ian Fleming

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969] ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The world can accommodate your situation, as it accommodates all situations. And your body will keep explaining to you how it all works, this original experiment, this lifelong gift. Your body will keep describing how, for the first time being at least, there is no escape from this particular vessel. These are your atoms. This is your consciousness. These are your experiences
your successes and mistakes. This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography. This is the existential container, the bowl of your life's soup, wherein something can be made sense of, wherein there is a cure, wherein you are. ~ Sarah Hall

if you want it really, you get it !!! ~ Ravinder Singh

(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)
At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was ... ~ Pierre Boulez

Although characterized as uncultured and unread, Hitler comes off in his demands to create a monumental signature for a Greater Germany as historically and artistically gifted."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 32 ~ Russel H.S. Stolfi

A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson's biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It's first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing. ~ F. Sionil Jose

I'm reading Joe Eszterhas biography; it's fabulous. Every time he made a movie, he fought with the director or the producer over the ending. ~ Chris Matthews

I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography. ~ Kathy Griffin

It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing ... This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read. ~ Allan Massie

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own. ~ Edward Abbey

I wish you believe, not for myprofit, but for yours. I daily pray the true God give you light, that you may believe. Whether you will ever believe in tis world I do not know, but when you die I know you will believe what I now say. You will then appear before God you now deny. - Adorinam Judson to his Burman teacher. ~ Courtney Anderson

The clown was an evil one. They're either good or bad, and this one was definitely the latter. ~ Chris Thrall

Oscar Wilde said: "Biography lends to death a new terror." Well, memoir adds that same promise to parenting. ~ Cathleen Miller

Sometimes when a person is not being heard, it is appropriate to blame him or her. Perhaps he or she is speaking obscurely; perhaps he is claiming too much; perhaps she is speaking rather too personally. And one can, perhaps, charge Spielrein on all three counts. But, on balance, her inability to win recognition for her insight into repression was not her fault; it was Freud's and Jung's. Preoccupied with their own theories, and with each other, the two men simply did not pause even to take in the ideas of this junior colleague let alone to lend a helping hand in finding a more felicitous expression for her thought. More ominously still, both men privately justified their disregard by implicitly casting her once more into the role of patient, as though that role somehow precluded a person from having a voice or a vision of his or her own. It was and remains a damning comment on how psychoanalysis was evolving that so unfair a rhetorical maneuver, one so at odds with the essential genius of the new therapeutic method, came so easily to hand. In the great race between Freud and Jung to systematize psychoanalytic theory, to codify it once and for all, a simpler truth was lost sight of: Sometimes a person is not heard because she is not listened to. ~ John Kerr