Biographical Facts Quotes

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

On the other hand, there are only so many people who really knew how she was exactly, like what did her accent sound like, and the fact that she developed profound deafness when she was first running the Harriet Lane.

Cervantes married in 1584, when he was thirty-seven and Catalina was nineteen. The marriage lasted thirty years, but Cervantes may have spent only about half of them with his wife.

I know a lot about Judy Garland. She was born in 1922, and I think she died in '69. When I was little, like, when I was 8, I knew all of her husbands' names.

So now it turns out that Thomas Jefferson was having sex with Sally Hemings while serving in the 101st Airborne during the Vietnam War.

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.

What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.

Heinrich Zimmerhe had a little saying : The best things cant be told - because they are transcendent, inexpressible truths. The second best are misunderstood : myths, which are metaphoric attempts to point to the way toward the first. And the third best have to do with history, science, biography, and so on. The only kind of talking that can be understood is this last kind.

What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts