#biography

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. ↗

— Dawn French

#biography #experience #feeling #first #going

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography? ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#escapist #fiction #why #why not

I had spent many nights in the jungle looking for game, but this was the first time I had ever spent a night looking for a man-eater. The length of road immediately in front of me was brilliantly lit by the moon, but to right and left the overhanging trees cast dark shadows, and when the night wind agitated the branches and the shadows moved, I saw a dozen tigers advancing on me, and bitterly regretted the impulse that had induced me to place myself at the man-eater's mercy. I lacked the courage to return to the village and admit I was too frightened to carry out my self-imposed task, and with teeth chattering, as much from fear as from cold, I sat out the long night. As the grey dawn was lighting up the snowy range which I was facing, I rested my head on my drawn-up knees, and it was in this position my men an hour later found me fast asleep; of the tiger I had neither heard nor seen anything. ↗

— Jim Corbett

#biography #memoirs #courage

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#characters #concerned #don quixote #ego #every

Biography should be written by an acute enemy. ↗

— Arthur Balfour

#biography #enemy #should #written

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval. ↗

— David Antin

#autobiography #her #him #his #husband

The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up. ↗

— Jack Dee

#ago #autobiography #back #book #called

Biography lends to death a new terror. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#death #lends #new #terror

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. ↗

— Harold Brodkey

#account #autobiography #case #come #death

But, Tarantino has seen all of my movies. He's seen my good stuff, he's seen my bad stuff, he's seen the ones I directed, he's read my autobiography. There's an awful lot of things he knows about me, all of which I think had something to do with his casting. ↗

— David Carradine

#autobiography #awful #bad #bad stuff #casting