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.

She watched the lights upon the shore. The glare that was Plymouth in the distance. She thought, the dance is over. The girls are going out of the overheated hall into the cold air. They shiver; their young men hurry after them. Some have got home and find their dresses stained or torn; yet they've enjoyed themselves. Which is the more important? Wallflowers think of the young men who haven't danced with them; probably each has a dream-day hero. Remember the lieutenant to whom I never spoke a word; yet I married him and had children and grandchildren, though he never knew it. And there are others, madly happy, look in their mirrors and smile and wonder. Even the latest home has a warm bed to go to.

Arthur Calder-Marshall

I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.

Margaret Drabble

Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn't matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

Walter Isaacson

I think that one of the qualifications of artists should be a vow of celibacy. They should be confined to ruining only their own lives.

It is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

A nation's wealth is too serious a matter to be left to the wealthy. The riches of a nation belong to all, to be shared among all for the general welfare.

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne

Just as there are O.K.-words in conversationship so there are O.K.-people to mention in Newstatesmanship.

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

All the great people and great things in life are failures. It is in doing what we cannot do but must try to do that humans rise to their exalted fulfillment. Maglie had tried to do with an old man's arm and back what a young man might not have been able to do as well. Of such failures is greatness made.

Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media.

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

I admit that I also yearn to leave my mark on society, and not see machines or people trample it foolishly.
On the one hand it's only shit; on the other, shit's shit, and what we desire in the world is less, not more, of it.

If you want to know about a man's gifts, you should see him at work, if you want to know about his temper, you should see him at home.

Lord David Cecil

Criticism prevents art from forgetting, prevents it from sinking into conformity.

Sins become more subtle as you grow older. You commit sins of despair rather than lust.

Piers Paul Read

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

Victoria Glendinning

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

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

John Bayley (writer)

An adventure differs from a mere feat in that it is tied to the externally unattainable. Only one end of the rope is in the hand, the other is not visible, and neither prayers, nor daring, nor reason can shake it free.

William Bolitho Ryall

We must be willing to change chairs if we want to grow. There is no permanent compatibility between a chair and a person. And there is no one right chair. What is right at one stage may be restricting at another or too soft. During the passage from one stage to another, we will be between two chairs. Wobbling no doubt, but developing.

The biographer must be close enough to sympathize, but far enough away to see clearly, to explain but not to defend or attack. He is literature's high-wire performer. A false step this way or that and he loses his balance — and his book.

Gerald Clarke (author)

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

Doris Langley Moore

Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him-the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

You think she's warm, but she's really quite aloof. She gives it all to the camera.