#biography

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote. ↗

— Jane Campion

#andrew #because #biography #fresh #how

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography. ↗

— Federico Fellini

#autobiographical #autobiography #oyster #pearl

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#escapist #fiction #why #why not

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

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

— Diane Keaton

#autobiography #everyone #lives #mother #required

It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#humor #parents #food

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication. ↗

— William L. Stull

#carver #chekhov #chico-state #john-gardner #paradise

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy. ↗

— Robert Caro

#examine #guy #only #pick #political

If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography. ↗

— P. J. O'Rourke

#autobiography #celebrity #drug addict #his #means

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.' ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#biography #considered #contains #degree #fiction