"A musician's biography is written wherever he performs; everybody hears what he is playing."
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Biographies quotes
Biographies
208 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Biographies quotes (page 3 of 11)
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"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."
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"For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history."
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"We're all story-telling creatures, and also I think that's the point about biography because the life is exemplary."
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"According to Nietzche," said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, "philosophy is the biography of the philosopher."
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"unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories"
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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 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."
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"I read every biography [of Jackie Kennedy] I could get my hands on."
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"When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication."
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"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."
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"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?"
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"We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies."
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"[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you."
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"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."
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"I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument."
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"I was kind of relieved with the way the book [The Proud Highway] came out. It's beyond an autobiography or a biography. I never knew what was going to come up next."
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