The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.
More Quotes from Leon Edel:
Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.Leon Edel
The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.
Leon Edel
The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.
Leon Edel
Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.
Leon Edel
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Based on Topics: Gossip Quotes, Life Quotes, Mastery & Expertise Quotes, Success QuotesBased on Keywords: overlap, shapeless
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