Personal Accounts Quotes

Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

I think it's possible to a certain extent to make those comparisons. The problem is the detail with which the comparison can be made. Of course, the first place to make such a comparison would be to ask for a testimony from different people and have people report on what they experience.

For my children, it makes sense to talk about modernizing Social Security, letting them create stronger personal accounts, letting them get a higher rate of return over the long run.

'The Wall' doesn't recount a specific soldier's experience in Iraq, but it captures the spirit of many experiences that were shared with me and with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and with John Cena.

The name of the album is 'Non-Fiction'. And, I'm calling it that because the name of every song on this album is derived from a true story. Now, some of the stories are mine. Some of the stories belong to some of my fans.

For 'Portillo's Hidden History of Britain,' I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history - ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.

Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.

Drawing on President Bush's reform plan, which would allow citizens to transfer part of their Social Security contributions into personal accounts, an alteration of the current system is needed to make necessary change.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

Human beings. People's stories. That's really what gets me excited.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

Of course there's objective truth, but when we're looking at people's accounts of it, it seems the real truth lies in the accretion of all these different versions.

History is often best told from the ground, out of a car window or in someone's kitchen, not through some huge production mechanism or grand framing device.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

The best stories come from real life.

What I would give, I thought, to have been present as Elizabeth Keckley measured Mary Lincoln for a new gown, to overhear their conversations on topics significant and ordinary, to observe the Lincoln White House from such an intimate perspective. From that moment, my interest in their remarkable friendship was captivated, and it never really waned.

It's often said that everybody has a story to tell, and I suppose that's true, but the problem is that most of them aren't worth telling.

Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.

There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.

We promote domestic savings by also things like the personal accounts associated with the president's Social Security initiative, which over time would generate more savings.

A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.

Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.

I look for subjects who have stories to tell - who are looking to tell something.