Anyone without a sense of humor is too pretentious to be a good magician.
And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?
Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.
Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so - look at the Bible, crammed with biographies,...
I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more ...
I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.
and (then , a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.
The trial designed to bring the most rigorous statistical analysis to the cause of lung cancer barely required elementary mathematics to prove its point.
In 1846 on of his Academy exhibits was a painting called . Turner found this passage for the Academy catalogue in the Book of Revelation: . To reinforce the note of voracious doom, he added two lines from Samuel Rogers' :
There was one face that looked like another face before it and then another face that looked like the face before it. This went all the way back until the beginning of time. Who knew what this face would look like a thousand years from now. Me?
There was one face that looked like another face before it and then another face that looked like the face before it. This went all the way back to the beginning of time. Who knew what this face would look like a thousand years from now. Me?
Satanism is developing two circles, an elitist group which I always intended my church to be, and the faddists who are becoming Satanists because it’s the thing to do.
A bright man of conviction and action is a beacon to his country, but a flash light to the scurrying of inaction, ego, and insecurity of lesser men.
In those days, men proved their strength and manliness by being well mannered, helpful, and gentle. Just how gentle they could be under trying circumstances, how civilised they could be in a harsh world, that was the measure of a man.
If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.
I'm an avid biography reader.
Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.
There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mank...
The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in ‘The New Biography’ (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance,...
I had lost faith in biography.
The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s - poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient r...
