Top 97 Biography Quotes
#2. Always do what you're afraid to do-Robert F. Kennedy
Evan Thomas
#3. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.
John Dominic Crossan
#4. Once undressed I felt less exposed. (...) Naked was my uniform. (...) There was no pressure to conform.
Aiden Shaw
#5. Although characterized as uncultured and unread, Hitler comes off in his demands to create a monumental signature for a Greater Germany as historically and artistically gifted."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 32
Russel H.S. Stolfi
#6. I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.
Denis O'Hare
#7. I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
Antonia Fraser
#8. I encourage anyone who has gone through hardships to look back through their life's chapters and see what can be turned into a book. For you never know what heartache God, one day, can turn into a redemptive story.
Jolina Petersheim
#9. The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.
P.G. Wodehouse
#10. Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.
Isaac Deutscher
#11. People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.
Dorothy Allison
#12. My first biography written in '73 was not 'Journey To The Moon.' It was 'Return To Earth.' Because for me, that was the more difficult task - disappointment.
Buzz Aldrin
#13. She had privacy, and the privilege of walking up and down the same battlements as the sentries.
John Peter Nettl
#14. Donna Summer... Is a singing sensation who brings joy to all music lovers, a gifted individual and major figure in the entertainment world whose colourful melodies and tales stay eternally in every fan's heart.
Nik A. Ramli
#16. Fake boobs are weird ya'll" read by Patrick Stewart.
Amy Poehler
#17. You can't hang out with negative people and live a positive life. Run from them!
Jettie Woodruff
#18. None of my friends had grandparents like these. ... Tony and Desolina were exotic.
James Vescovi
#19. Courage, kindness and a great determination to succeed in life with a smile were hallmarks of my wonderful wife. And why her story deserves to be told.
Paul Roberts
#20. The only biography I read was about Al Bell, of Stax Records. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Al Bell.
Juicy J
#21. I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
Philip Roth
#22. Desolina and Tony had attended one-room schoolhouses until the third grade. ... According to Tony, there were hardly enough pencils and sober teachers to go around. [Author's grandparents educational background.]
James Vescovi
#23. Luggage and guests did not travel together ... in fact, luggage went by a different route, so suitcases could be distributed to guest rooms before they arrived
Estella M. Chung
#24. Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.
Jeffrey Rasley
#25. George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife - a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible - to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with
Justin Spring
#26. Writing a biography is not a love affair. It's not a marriage. It's a job, it's a piece of work.
Hermione Lee
#27. I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.
Joyce Carol Oates
#28. There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
Henry David Thoreau
#29. A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.
Alan Ayckbourn
#31. I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument.
Stefan Zweig
#32. Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
A.S. Byatt
#33. 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
#34. Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more.
Mike Jay
#35. The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.
Bernard Malamud
#36. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Norman Spinrad
#37. In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.
Anthony Trollope
#38. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.
Don DeLillo
#39. Christine did not live, or love, as most people do. She lived boundlessly, as generous as she could be cruel, prepared to give her life at any moment for a worthy cause, but rarely sparing a thought for the many casualties that fell in her wake.
Clare Mulley
#40. Nor do I like being told upsetting news - unless there is a good reason. I can't help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.
Joyce Carol Oates
#41. It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.
Christopher Hitchens
#42. 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
#43. 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.
Jonathan Coe
#44. Sketches Einstein: His Life and Universe A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas)
Walter Isaacson
#45. For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.
Rachel Holmes
#47. Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
Tom Stoppard
#48. The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.
Thornton Wilder
#49. As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Gore Vidal
#50. 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
#51. I'm self-taught. I didn't just become a man, it was a decision.
Aiden Shaw
#52. He was able to sit in silence for long stretches without feeling a need to make small talk.
Charles R. Cross
#53. He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.
George Plimpton
#54. Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.
Noel Riley Fitch
#55. I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I play everybody.
David Bowie
#56. Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
Claire Tomalin
#58. 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
#59. Our theology must become biography.
Tim Hansel
#60. Whereas Hunt recommended universal charity, Keats, feeling himself 'in a Mist', relied on a knowing passivity: 'Men should bear with each other - there lives not the Man who may not be cut up, aye hashed to pieces on his weakest side'.
Nicholas Roe
#61. As mankind 'matures,' as it becomes more possible to be frank in the scrutiny of the self and others and in the publication of one's findings, biography and autobiography will take the place of fiction for the investigation and discussion of character.
H.G.Wells
#62. Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad - I could not bear to "outlive" them - for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.
Joyce Carol Oates
#63. An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and illuminating, this new biography will endure.
Jon Meacham
#64. I'm not a very good writer. But I'm a HELLUVA re-writer.
Laini Giles
#65. The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporary, fix for a breaking mind, a coping strategy for a life that had become too brutally contradictory to sustain otherwise.
Mike Jay
#66. There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.
Antonio Damasio
#67. Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it's familiar stuff and has all been written about before.
Jane Ridley
#69. There is also present in every human being, in everyone's biography-although sometimes harrowing cases of systematic neglect, present in the matter of absence, so if longing for that which never was there then too, deeply suspect, should have been.
Paul Ricoeur
#70. When you see the Statue of Liberty, you will be in America.
Antonio Russo
#72. The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.
Joseph Campbell
#73. In the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#74. By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life.
John Ellis
#75. I wish that I really were all troubled and beautiful the way that some people are. Give myself the kind of beginning worthy of the Biography Channel.
Ainslie Hogarth
#76. It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.
Joyce Carol Oates
#77. What drove us crazy wasn't necessarily the sexual freedom his critic claimed he was unleashing, but freedom, period. Freedom to be yourself, to express yourself, to wear what you wanted to wear, to look the way you wanted to look, to have your own style, your own talk.
Larry Geller, Joel Spector, Patricia Romanowski
#78. Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?
James Hillman
#79. [As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.
Roman Payne
#80. A good biography is the richest experience. When you watch a TV series together with someone is like being in a novel with them.
Darcey Steinke
#81. Coexisting with the radiant masculinity of Apollonian Keats is a lunar poet of enchanted night in thrall to the goddess Hecate.
Nicholas Roe
#82. Other thoughtful year-round gestures to staff included silver picture frames for wedding anniversaries, flowers to ailing spouses, additional checks for medical bills and even a pet dog
Estella M. Chung
#83. Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and in her art (an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch," and
Shirley Jackson
#84. Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
Philip Guedalla
#85. I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'
Jamie Cullum
#86. I decided I had to find out if it was my scene or not. So I stepped in at the deep end. It leads you to survive or drown. Very often you survive.
Theresa Sjoquist
#87. 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.
Dawn French
#88. There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.
Thomas Szasz
#89. Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
Oscar Wilde
#90. Your past doesn't define who you are. Biography isn't Destiny.
Kathryn Perez
#91. She said, 'No, you learned that you have power - power and determination. I love you and I am proud of you. With those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere.
Maya Angelou
#92. There's three different kinds of Christian," said Cash. "There's preaching Christians, church-playing Christians, and then there's practicing Christian. I'm trying very hard to be a practicing Christian.
Steve Turner
#93. What are you reading?" she asked as he poured himself scotch and her a vodka. She looked over to the deserted volume. "Stories and Legends of Pagan Russia," she read aloud. "Are you catching up on Yvan's biography?
Amy Kuivalainen
#94. She will speculate that she didn't fully know her husband - this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband "alive" in her memory - elusive, teasing.
Joyce Carol Oates
#95. That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can't confront it.
Joyce Carol Oates
#96. I often noticed that the surrounding mountains inspired Hitler. He once joked that here he stood 'above the world' in an environment comparable to Olympius, legendary mount of the gods, but that alone can never have been the motivation for himto put down his private roots on Obersalzberg.
Heinz Linge
#97. Behind each biography there should always be a rich treasury of unformulated knowledge, a tapestry that has not been unrolled.
Iris Origo
