Noel Riley Fitch Quotes

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

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

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

I wouldn't want to write a biography of anyone. I'd feel too inhibited by the facts and too much pressure to do the subject's life justice.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

As always, we start off with asking, 'What's a good episode?' We don't think about timing, and we don't think about logistics. We just think about what would be good.

You can dress it up, but it comes down to the fact that a movie is only as good as its script.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

The difficulty with telling stories about real people is you have to find a way of mixing yourself into the matter.

I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

I would like to continue to tell stories of what I did in a biographical way, so I will continue to write.

I'm actually quite critical of the storytelling theme. I think all the storytellers are not storytellers.