The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Memory that yearns to join the center a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed like those bamboo thighs of the god.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean it comes with the landscape and faced with its beauty the sigh of History dissolves.

Break a vase and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.

The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

I'm an avid biography reader.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.

This is the best biography by me I have ever read.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

I'm narrating the television series Biography. I'm still involved in my music - I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I'm writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project.

I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.

What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.

John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.