#biography

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. ↗

— Jim Hodges

#development #emotional #fabrics #figuring #growing

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury. ↗

— George Plimpton

#biography #editor #jury #oral #pleasures

Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. ↗

— Criss Jami

#art #artist #author #autobiography #character

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?' ↗

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

#asked #autobiography #me #simon #why

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men. ↗

— Georges F. Doriot

#mortality #perspective #business

Broad-Based Education: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. —Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005 ↗

— George Beahm

#inspirational #beauty

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. […] If the same person were to write his autobiography twice, first in one mode and then in the other, the two accounts would be so different that it would be hard to believe that they referred to the same person. In one he would appear as an obsessed creature, a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty, humorless and over-life-size; in the other as coolly detached, full of humor and self-mockery, lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by Sancho Panza, he never prays; as Sancho Panza seen by Don Quixote, he never giggles. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#don-quixote #sancho-panza #beauty

In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived according to aesthetic proportions. The "plot" of a biography is superficially based on the birth, life and death of the subject; "character," in the vision of the author. Both are as much creations of the biographer, as they are of a novelist. We content ourselves with "authorized fictions. ↗

— Ira Bruce Nadel

#biography #death

When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain. ↗

— Anne Carson

#autobiography-of-red #carson #dreams

I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster. ↗

— Avi Steinberg

#reading #librarians