20th-century Biographer Quotes

Doris Lessing

Patricia Cornwell

Walter Isaacson

Aron Ralston

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Mary Soames

Lord David Cecil

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

Just as a child is born without fear, so is it born without prejudice. Prejudice, like fear, is acquired.

Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable.

And even when success comes, as I am sure it will, bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought after women at a ball...

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Christianity is not a religion, it's a relationship with God through Christ.

Jerry B. Jenkins

The part we play is not as we want it, but as we are made-with the genitals God gave us.

There is a gesture he has, a motion, that always reminds me of a great batter leaning into a hit. He has a way of throwing one foot forward, putting his head down a bit as he silently runs the valves, and then the cheeks bloom out in the way that has mystified his dentist for years, and he hits into the solo. When that foot goes forward like that, you know that John Birks Gillespie is no longer clowning. Stand back.

It is clear that the flame of True Freedom had passed with naval supremacy and constitutional, consultative government from the United Provinces to Great Britain, where it was regarded with quite as much national pride.

Mathematics is not best learned passively; you don't sop it up like a romance novel. You've got to go out to it, aggressive, and alert, like a chess master pursuing checkmate.

No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

It's okay to be afraid. It's not okay to let the fear STOP you.

I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable.

In the love affair, as in sculpture, poetry, and every other fine art, no lasting success can be achieved without skill.

Doris Langley Moore

Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane. The fantasy of needing a blood-diet, a corpse-diet, was inseparable from the distorted relation to the parents I had been trying to clarify in myself and which one way or another existed in everyone. The corpse-eater was still in fantasy feeding on the parents. We discussed these ideas and decided to eat no more meat, no more animal products of any kind (such as milk, cheese, eggs) and to discard mineral salt. Apart from a few extreme applications of our position, when I tried to eat such nauseous things as raw potatoes, we found that we felt very much better in health.

One of the penalties of longevity is that some of the dearest and most familiar faces depart, leaving gaps which cannot be filled.

She imagines herself clean as a fish,
evasive, solitary, dumb. Her prayer:
to make peace with her own monstrous nature.

Elaine Feinstein

What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul, a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome and therefore, of what use graduate work?

The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.

The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.

Victoria Glendinning

Commercial to the core, Elvis was the kind of singer dear to the heart of the music business. For him to sing a song was to sell a song. His G clef was a dollar sign.

The happiest marriages are full of alternative lives, lived in the head, unknown to the partner.

John Bayley (writer)

Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.

To learn something, to master something, anything, is as sweet as first love.

Because I have no actual sisters, it is my friends from Ames who've exposed me to every facet of womanhood.

The increase in the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks from 143 Million dollars in 1913 to 45 Billion dollars in 1949 went directly to the private stockholders of the [Federal Reserve] banks.

Eustace Mullins