Manning Marable Quotes

Malcolm X had a habit of scribbling notes in small pieces of paper that [Alex] Haley would surreptitiously pick up at the end of their discussions.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.

Serious biographies need to have a historical base in facts.

When you are absorbed in a biographical subject, you get so close you don't realise the potential effect of what you say. You are trying to get at the truth.

I read a lot of biographies, and so much is just so boring or so, like, 'Why did you say that?'

Anne Romaine collected her own parallel archive to [Alex] Haley.

No one writes better historical fiction than Steven Pressfield. The Afghan War that was waged by Alexander the Great 2000 years ago is eerily similar to the one that's being fought today. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to better understand what American and Coalition forces are up against in one of history's most tribal and troubled regions.

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

Books are dead men talking.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.

What Malcolm X did not know is that back in 1962, a collaborator of Alex Haley, fellow named - a journalist named Alfred Balk had approached the F.B.I. regarding an article that he and Haley were writing together for The Saturday Evening Post, and the F.B.I. had an interest in castigating the Nation of Islam, and isolating it from the mainstream of Negro civil rights activity.

They did not know what we can now guess at, contemplating the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it appears in ordinary existence.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes, the epic, the oracles. Sentences inscribed on the walls of the crypts; examples in the portals of the temples. But in those times the writer was not an individual alone; he was the people.

To me the question is always this: if a ray of light came out of the sky and said, "Your next book will never be published - would you still write it?" If the answer is yes, the book is worth writing.

I had a checklist in my mind of the things that make a biography practical. Is the source material centralized? Is it easy to find? Are there new primary sources that no one has ever had access to? Are all the sources in English? If they're not, are they in a language that you speak? And I realized that not only is Armstrong the most important figure of Jazz in the 20th Century, but he's a perfect subject for a biography for all of these reasons. I had always loved his music and I had been fascinated in him as a personality. And that's really the key to writing a biography.

There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.

When I compare myself and my opponents in other countries in the light of history, I do not fear the verdict on our respective mentalities.

The Bible itself is a book that constantly must be wrestled with and re-interpreted. ... Bible interpretation is colored by historical context, the reader's bias and current realities. The more you study the Bible, the more questions it raises. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says.

We have to see today in light of the transition, say, from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry, and from industry to post-industry. We're in an epoch transition.