Top 97 Biography Quotes
#1. The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.
Thomas Mallon
#2. When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'
Stacy Schiff
#3. The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesnt discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.
Leon Edel
#4. Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.
Horace Mann
#5. When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I'm tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else's life offends my vanity.
Michael Dirda
#6. A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'
Joyce Carol Oates
#7. I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.
A. Scott Berg
#8. ...That is my biography from the first day of my chess life to the present.
JOURNALIST. And your plans.
PLAYER. To play!
Mikhail Tal
#9. Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.
Edmund White
#10. You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.
Anthony Marra
#11. I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.
David Maraniss
#12. Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#13. One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
Carlos Fuentes
#14. 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.
Robert Caro
#15. Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness ... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.
Mark Twain
#16. Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.
Pamela Stephenson
#17. Bob Hope was an entertainment colossus, shrewd and influential well beyond show business. Richard Zoglin's biography captures it all
the public and private Hope.
Tom Brokaw
#18. [On writing biography:] If you wish to see a person you must not start by seeing through him.
Iris Origo
#19. I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.
Amity Shlaes
#20. The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]
Vladimir Nabokov
#21. I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography.
Kathy Griffin
#22. It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.
Nathanael West
#23. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.
Aldous Huxley
#24. I feel I have to live a little longer before I write a sequel to my auto biography which covers my experiences up until October 1991.
Holly Johnson
#26. I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.
Eleanor Catton
#27. Sadly, we have confused biblical literature with history, and turned prophecy into biography.
Eli Of Kittim
#28. The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.
Edward Abbey
#29. P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.
C. Wright Mills
#30. It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
George Plimpton
#31. People are complicated," she said. "Didn't they teach you that in biography school?
Frederick Weisel
#32. Political science without biography is a form of taxidermy.
Harold Lasswell
#33. Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
Susan Sontag
#34. Hmmm," he said. "Quite a novel idea, I must say. But hardly conducive to a bestselling, tell-all, no-holds-barred biography.
Alan Bradley
#35. John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.
Mark Shields
#36. And if Henry Higgins is not the most reprehensible character ever written for the stage, that's only because somewhere, somehow, someone is composing a musical biography of Ronald Reagan
Steve Kluger
#37. I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs. To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness.
Thomas McGuane
#38. When I was writing my biography of LeBon," Bob Nye told me, "he seemed to me the biggest asshole in the whole of creation.
Jon Ronson
#39. When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.
George Vecsey
#40. I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#41. Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days' illness from pneumonia. Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says: Seldom had 'the reaper whose name is Death' gathered such illustrious harvest as between December 1880 and April 1882.
Anonymous
#42. I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
Barbara Kruger
#43. Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!
Clara Barton
#44. I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.
Douglas Brinkley
#45. A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.
Harold Rosenberg
#46. When we approach the Bible as history and biography, we approach the Bible in the wrong spirit. We must read the Bible, not primarily as historians seeking information, but as men and women seeking God.
Billy Graham
#47. People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.
Claire Tomalin
#48. In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.
Kathryn Harrison
#49. People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
Anthony Powell
#51. I read more books for research purposes, whether it's a fictionalized biography of Johannes Gutenberg or a stack of urban fantasies.
Jim C. Hines
#52. If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.
Archibald Geikie
#53. And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, 'So you've come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical.
Tim Parks
#54. So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.
Michael Palin
#55. Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.
Joseph Campbell
#56. Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.
Edmund White
#57. I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.
Richard Attenborough
#58. Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.
Darin Strauss
#59. The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#60. If you go through the biography of any famous personality you idolize you are sure to see the how the words 'I can' and 'I believe' played a very vital role in their fame.
Stephen Richards
#61. On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
Paul Murray Kendall
#62. Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
Anita Brookner
#63. [M]an has always harbored the desire to rewrite his own biography, to change the past, to wipe out tracks, both his own and other's. (p.130)
Milan Kundera
#64. All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Rebecca West
#66. I don't want to say that most rock bands live these formulaic biography existences - but they kinda do. There's always a divorce. There's always an OD. There's always a bad business manager.
Dave Grohl
#67. I didn't think any biography could do justice to one of the few honest-to-goodness geniuses of our time, a walking paradox who wore a cloak of complexity and elusiveness, but Lisa Rogak has done an exemplary job of it.
Otto Penzler
#68. I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress ... It's like a secret society up there.
Kitty Kelley
#69. Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
James McBride
#70. That requires quite an imaginative leap because it's hard for me to imagine that my biography would be of much interest to anyone, and because I'm a fairly private person, the notion doesn't appeal to me.
Debra Dean
#72. Only one who takes over his own life history can see in it the realization of his self. Responsibility to take over one's own biography means to get clear about who one wants to be.
Jurgen Habermas
#73. I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'
Alexandra Roach
#74. Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so - look at the Bible, crammed with biographies, very popular reading.
Claire Tomalin
#75. Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Robert Hall
#76. When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication.
George Bernard Shaw
#79. Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.
Jane Campion
#80. The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.
Ron Chernow
#81. The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.
Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks
#82. The girl in the red coat would remain the the sweet but sore point in my biography: the promise never kept; the mystery that would always remain a mystery. And yet, I regretted nothing. Someday it would be less painful. Someday my heart would be light again. I had to only let it happen.
Nicolas Barreau
#83. I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.
Richard C. Armitage
#85. 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.
John Irving
#86. One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography.
Theodor Haecker
#87. Nora Barnacle is not a very interesting person." So said Richard Ellmann, author of the definitive James Joyce biography, to Brenda Maddox, author of the only Nora Barnacle biography, who quoted him to me.
Jessa Crispin
#88. The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V.S. Naipaul
#89. A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.
Robert Dessaix
#91. I don't give you editorial control. I want to meet you. I want to interview everybody who's ever known you. I want to see your correspondence. I want to see your bank statements. But you will have no control over what I write. That's why I really believe in the unauthorized biography.
Kitty Kelley
#92. Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.
Antonio Damasio
#93. Biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
Erica Jong
#94. I read Michael Caine's biography. It was about him growing up
Frank Lampard
#95. Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
Walter Jon Williams
#96. Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V.S. Naipaul
#97. Live your life as if you are writing your Biography.
Keshia Chante
#98. I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
#99. ... no biography of his existed in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as the rest of Europe and even in the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers ...
Roberto Bolano
#100. 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
