David Strathairn Quotes

I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

I try to find some similarities between myself and the characters, even if it's the tiniest thing.

I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom.

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

I kind of embarked on a fruitless search to find information about my character, Frederick Aiken. And it was fruitless, unfortunately, because there's so little about him.

All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

It was deeply important for me to understand where Mandela came from. Because we know where he was going, and that's a famous story, but who was he? Where did he come from? What was his upbringing?

Geoff Leonard knows more about me than I know myself.

For every character, I think about who they are, their story, what they are, and who they were before their game started. What was their life like? Where did they grow up? What were their parents like?

I had lost faith in biography.

I never really got to know Jimi as a person.

I've always been steady on and off keeping diaries and journals. I try to document everything so I can remember it the older I get.

To make a Frankenstein monster of a complex character like Stalin would have been too simplistic. I wanted to show who he was and, if you like, how he happened.

I think of the biopics I've written as exploring a more grown-up side of myself, through other characters' lives.

I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.

I suppose I've been interested in Abraham Lincoln for almost as long as I can remember. My first Lincoln book was the Classics Illustrated comic book version of the life of Lincoln, and with that, I was hooked.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

I long To hear the story of your life, which must Take the ear strangely.

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.

Until now, he has never told the full story of his life, in his own voice.

There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.