Biographies Quotes - Page 6

I wanted to make a film that wasn't just a biography. When you watched it, you actually felt that you watched a movie, that you had an emotional reaction. In order to do that, I felt that I had to really keep myself emotionally raw while working on the film. I had to feel myself crying, so the audience could be moved, too.

I grew up reading biographies on groups, and I love all that. The thing about biographies, it's the old cliché but it's true - a lot of the time these things are more about the author than they are about the group.

And if Henry Higgins is not the most reprehensible character ever written for the stage, that's only because somewhere, somehow, someone is composing a musical biography of Ronald Reagan

A musician's biography is written wherever he performs; everybody hears what he is playing.

I've always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.

I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.

As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It’s not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination.

The parallel circumstances and kindred images to which we readily conform our minds are, above all other writings, to be found in the lives of particular persons, and therefore no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons

There is no history; only biography.

All history is biography.

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.

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

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

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

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

The facts of a person's life will, like murder, come out.

I read every biography [of Jackie Kennedy] I could get my hands on.

There were, like, 20 of [Jackie Kennedy's biographies], which was interesting because they are not exactly high literature - they are pulpy.But the [Arthur] Schlesinger transcripts ended up being the most useful of anything.

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

Biographies of British pop celebrities are terrible.

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

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