Top 44 Best Biographies Quotes
#1. I hate biographies which say, I was called to such and such an office, and he offered me so and so, and I got so and so money. I find that very tedious. The best biographies are written by other people.
Leslie Caron
#2. The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race.
Lynn Barber
#3. A new biography of Madonna came out last week, and apparently the biography lists all the men she's slept with. The book is apparently called the Manhattan Telephone Directory.
Bill Maher
#4. Let This Voice Be Heard fulfills the mandate of biography at its best because Maurice Jackson has captured the history of a great moral movement's origins in a single, extraordinary life. An indispensable addition to the antislavery bibliography.
David Levering Lewis
#5. For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.
Rachel Holmes
#7. Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
Tom Stoppard
#8. I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#9. Along with all those books about Lincoln, Obama might read some biographies of Napoleon. The general who established the Legion d'Honneur understood that people fought as much for medals as for morals.
Tina Brown
#10. Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality.
Burton Silverman
#11. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.
Charles Wheelan
#12. I haven't had a chance to pick up a good book in a long time, because I've been either reading scripts or learning them or writing them. And so, by the time the day is done, I usually just want to click on The Bachelor and fall asleep. But I gravitate toward biographies and things like that.
Justin Theroux
#14. Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Walter Lippmann
#15. Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
Claire Tomalin
#16. In my small way I became an integral part of the pottery movement, and added fuel to the fire which consumed New Zealand and and swept pottery to the forefront of the of the fifties and sixties.
Theresa Sjoquist
#17. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. Our theology must become biography.
Tim Hansel
#19. I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'
(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993)
Peter F. Drucker
#21. Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels,
teaching high living ,high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and, the world's good.
Samuel Smiles
#22. Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.
Deana J. Driver
#23. The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.
Harold Acton
#24. I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
Philip Roth
#26. I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
Anne Lamott
#28. For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#29. That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.
Anthony Holden
#30. In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those who achieve high levels of success in some areas of life tend to take a LOT more action than those who settle for average or below average results.
Steve Pavlina
#31. I've had three biographies made about my life so people know an awful lot about me.
David Cassidy
#33. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
Milan Kundera
#34. I want to convey a mood, and what you are reading is a constituent of how you feel. In biographies they should always tell us that, routinely, in the margin: what they were reading. What
Martin Amis
#35. I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
Barry McGee
#38. Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.
Jurgen Habermas
#39. I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
Robert Caro
#40. Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility.
John O'Donohue
#41. Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.
Rachel Holmes
#42. In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.
Charles J. Shields
#43. Biographies of British pop celebrities are terrible.
Mick Jagger
#44. However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
