#biography

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much. ↗

— Paul Auster

#metafiction #life

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. ↗

— Aharon Appelfeld

#also #become #besides #biography #cannot

I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view. ↗

— Richard Attenborough

#destinies #fascinated #i #just #love

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me. ↗

— Jane Campion

#andrew #back #between #biography #deep

I caught a cold and didn't have time to work on my autobiography. ↗

— Julie Doucet

#caught #cold #i #time #work

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. ↗

— Justin Hayward

#biography #diary #form #heart #i

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. ↗

— Yevgeny Yevtushenko

#anything #autobiography #else #footnote #his

Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn’t come through. It was just not there anymore. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew. ↗

— Anne Moody

#civil-rights #coming-of-age-in-mississippi #faith #god #nature

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