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Quotations on Biography 70 Quotes Found 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. Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. Biography should be written by an acute enemy. One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead. An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy. Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography. The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps. Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form. In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink. So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here. No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives. Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying. One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography. I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it. And then I wrote my first autobiography when I - well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I've written about one book every two years. In fact Sarah Palin has created more jobs than Obama has. She created eleven jobs fact-checking at the AP just for the Palin autobiography. I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based. Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that. I think that I'm busy in the present, and I don't want to go back. Well, there's been an unauthorized biography, and you can't stop them. It didn't worry me. I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography. I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first. We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography? I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography. Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible. Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium. Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be. Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history. My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life. I was trying to write an autobiography using prints and patterns that reference emotional, psychological, and personal development in my work, as a person growing up, figuring out who I was. I used fabrics to stand in for occurrences. It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down. I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography. An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory. This sounds like my autobiography, but I thought this would be a good time to sound off about myself, as I think that I have been silent too long about my views and opinions. I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances. 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. The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory. After reading Eminem's autobiography, which I did because I'm so interested in him as an artist, I respect him a lot. Even though he seems angry and mad, he's had to fight so many demons in his life. All autobiography is self-indulgent. I've been working on my autobiography, just pecking away in longhand. The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more detail you recall. It's not all pleasant! I'm narrating the television series Biography. I'm still involved in my music - I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I'm writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project. The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography. In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world - God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator. I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel. It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury. 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. I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.
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