#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. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#became #biography #circle #closed #could

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. ↗

— Roald Dahl

#autobiography #book #boring #details #full

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

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

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. ↗

— Bob Kane

#autobiography #been #good #good time #i

My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives. ↗

— Diane Keaton

#autobiography #everyone #lives #mother #required

Outside and inside, life and soul, appear as parallels in “case history” and “soul history.” A case history is a biography of historical events in which one took part: family, school, work, illness, war, love. The soul history often neglects entirely some or many of these events, and spontaneously invents fictions and “inscapes” without major outer correlations. The biography of the soul concerns experience. It seems not to follow the one-way direction of the flow of time, and it is reported best by emotions, dreams, and fantasies … The experiences arising from major dreams, crises, and insights give definition to the personality. They too have “names” and “dates” like the outer events of case history; they are like boundary stones, which mark out one’s own individual ground. These marks can be less denied than can the outer facts of life, for nationality, marriage, religion, occupation, and even one’s own name can all be altered … Case history reports on the achievements and failures of life with the world of facts. But the soul has neither achieved nor failed in the same way … The soul imagines and plays – and play is not chronicled by report. What remains of the years of our childhood play that could be set down in a case history? … Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself … We cannot get a soul history through a case history. ↗

— James Hillman

#soul #soul-biography #soul-history #dating

I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speading on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of time around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is,increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself. ↗

— Françoise Gilot

#painting #picasso #life

You have to get lost before you can be found. ↗

— Jeff Rasley

#biography #charity #himalayas #memoir #mountaineering

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life. ↗

— Adam Gopnik

#history #life