Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html
Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.
“I guess I should have written two books of my life, one for the adults and another for the kids.”
Speaking shortly before his death, as quoted in "Sports of the Times: Down Memory Lane with the Babe" by Arthur Daley, The New York Times ((August 18, 1948), p. 32
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Babe Ruth 70
American baseball player 1895–1948Related quotes
August 9, 1965, when Lee announced the separation of Singapore from Malaysia, as quoted in The Theatre and the State in Singapore: Orthodoxy and Resistance, Terence Chong
1960s
“Lately, I feel like my life is a book written in a language I don't know how to read.”
Source: The Hero of Ages
Remarks about her ambitions early in her career (1991), Not Bad for a Girl documentary (1995)
1991–1995
Some Reasons Why (1881)
Context: Suppose then, that I do read this Bible honestly, fairly, and when I get through I am compelled to say, “The book is not true.” If this is the honest result, then you are compelled to say, either that God has made no revelation to me, or that the revelation that it is not true, is the revelation made to me, and by which I am bound. If the book and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and the brain do not agree? Either God should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book.
I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)
As quoted in "Darko Responds To Carmelo About '03 Draft: 'Not Necessary To Ridicule'" https://971theticket.radio.com/articles/news/darko-responds-to-carmelo-not-necessary-to-ridicule (31 March 2020), 97.1 The Ticket
2020s
“One man is as good as another until he has written a book.”
Letters