I've always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.
But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.
Why should I be limited by my own biography?
I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.
Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.
There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
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.
Somebody approached me about writing a biography on me, I told them they were too late.
All of our theology must eventually become biography.
I possess every good quality, but the one that distinguishes me above all is modesty.
I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.
I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
This is the best biography by me I have ever read.
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.
Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.
biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.
I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.
At the Sex Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, they were a phenomenal help, too. We went out there for a few days, and they gave us access to materials. And the biographies, there are four or five, ranging from very poor to excellent.
Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?