Louis Fischer Quotes

There is properly no history; only biography.

Biography is the best history.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.

Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

Biography is the best form of history.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.

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 haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.

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

I have always wanted to make a series of films which would be like an 'emotional history' that conveys what it feels like to live through history as an experience rather than a grand story. It would be about the relationship between the tiny fragments and moments of personal experience, and the continual backdrop of big events.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

My friends have made the story of my life.

Let This Voice Be Heard fulfills the mandate of biography at its best because Maurice Jackson has captured the history of a great moral movement's origins in a single, extraordinary life. An indispensable addition to the antislavery bibliography.

It has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else.

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

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.

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.