Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know they real truth about his or her love affairs.
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No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
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There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.
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There is properly no history; only biography
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The best biographies leave their readers with a sense of having all but entered into a second life and of having come to know another human being in some ways better than he knew himself.
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Biography lends to death a new terror.
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Biography is the only true history
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Reading history is good for all of us, he says, not surprisingly, perhaps, but his rationale is a fresh, somewhat bracing thought: If you know history, you know that there is no such thing as a self-made man or self-made woman. We are shaped by people we have never met. Yes, reading history will make you a better citizen and more appreciative of the law, and of freedom, and of how the economy works or doesn't work, but it is also an immense pleasurethe way art is, or music is, or poetry is. And it's never stale.
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Once the implicit aim of biography was to uplift now it is to unveil.
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But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
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The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.
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I can find my biography in every fable that I read
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Boswell is the first of biographers
From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe as well. We used to get arrested every other week--that is, the old man would get arrested. The first crack out of the box here in New York state, the Keith office raised my age two years, because the original law said that no child under 5 could even look at the audience, let alone do anything. So they said I was 7. And the law read that a child can't do acrobatics, can't walk a wire, can't juggle--a lot of those things--but there was nothing said in the law that you can't kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we'd get called into court every other week, see.
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Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is [as] unfair as only sport can be.
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Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
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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.
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In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink.
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Ansel taught a workshop in Yosemite which I happened to attend. We talked. He suggested I come work for him after I finished school. Ansel was then in his 80s. I was his photographic assistant until his death in 1984, after which I worked with his friend Mary Alinder on Ansel's biography. The entire experience was very much a privilege.
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There's an overwhelming amount of material,.. You have to choose. It's a creative act, and also subjective, so the author of a biography paints his or her own portrait. And you want to make that an interesting read and well written.
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The support for Gore comes much more quickly and much more easily once voters get a sense of who he is. Until they understand something about his motivation and his biography and his background, it is difficult for voters to get a handle on him outside of the image of a vice president.
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One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography.
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The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.
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That's what an obit is supposed to be-a picture, a snapshot. It's not a full-length biography, it's not a portrait. It's a quick picture.
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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.
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