The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.
When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.
Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.
I hate biographies which say, I was called to such and such an office, and he offered me so and so, and I got so and so money. I find that very tedious. The best biographies are written by other people.
I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.
I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.
According to Kim Jong-Il's biography, they say he has been constantly accused of dishonesty, drunkenness and sexual excess. So if he lived here, he could be in Congress.
[W. H. R. ] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.
I am a total sucker for an actor's autobiographybiography. I have probably read most of them.
I read Michael Caine's biography. It was about him growing up
I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.
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.
You ask whether I am going over to the history of science. . . no, I am not as old as that.
When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.
Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography.
[Flürscheim] was good at unanswerable arguments.