Top 100 Quotes About Biographies
#2. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I've had three biographies made about my life so people know an awful lot about me.
David Cassidy
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
Philip Roth
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.
Charles J. Shields
#19. Biographies of British pop celebrities are terrible.
Mick Jagger
#20. However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.
Rachel Holmes
#25. Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
Tom Stoppard
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.
Charles Wheelan
#30. 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
#32. Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Walter Lippmann
#33. Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
Claire Tomalin
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Our theology must become biography.
Tim Hansel
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#40. The gospels, never meant to report, but
rather to convince, are in no sense objective and dispassionate biographies. They are glowing accounts meant to persuade people of the writers' convictions.
Thomas Daniel Nehrer
#42. The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.
Joseph Campbell
#43. Biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.
Phyllis Rose
#44. 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
#46. I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.
Barbra Streisand
#47. I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.
Jamie Wyeth
#48. I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.
Wilbur Smith
#49. But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.
John Green
#50. [I]nternalized experiences of selfhood are linked to autobiographical narratives, which are linked to biographies, legal testimonies, and medical case histories, which are linked to forms of therapy and theories of the subject. . .
Anthony Kenny
#51. Behind each biography there should always be a rich treasury of unformulated knowledge, a tapestry that has not been unrolled.
Iris Origo
#52. We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies-all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.
Angela Carter
#53. The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.
Russell Baker
#54. Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at thesame time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch's biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!
Franz Grillparzer
#55. I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
Walter Isaacson
#56. Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
Thomas Carlyle
#58. I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.
Richard Lewis
#59. The Internet is dumb. The Internet, with all its access to brain research, anthropology journals, social studies networks, and biographies and autobiographies, can't begin to map the complexity of our lives, or how we each affect others.
Dee Williams
#60. READ. You have no business wanting to be a writer unless you are a reader. You should read fantasies and essays, biographies and poetry, fables and fairy tales. Read, read, read, read, read.
Kate DiCamillo
#61. With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.
Blake Bailey
#62. In my downtime, you'll mostly find me curled up with a book. I love reading biographies. My favourites are those of Dalai Lama, Osama Bin Laden, and Einstein.
Madhur Bhandarkar
#63. I believe, from reading biographies, that the great musicians have also been great cooks: Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach. I think I've worked out why this is - unsociable hours, plus general creativity.
Jamie Cullum
#64. Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Tom Stoppard
#65. If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.
Colm Toibin
#66. I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#67. As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts..
Dan Brown
#68. A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.
Rachel Holmes
#69. Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false ... In most instances, they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.
Abraham Lincoln
#70. A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson's biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It's first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing.
F. Sionil Jose
#71. I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.
Isabel Gillies
#72. Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it.
Andrew Dickson White
#73. I read everything that Tolkien wrote, and also read biographies of him. I was fascinated by his experiences in World War I, which includes the loss of life of some of his very, very close friends. I think he writes about that a lot in 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings.'
Richard C. Armitage
#74. Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.
Kate Braverman
#75. Each second of every time has its own story and history to be filed.
Auliq Ice
#76. On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.
Kate Zambreno
#77. When I was younger, when I was at school, I did read a lot of fiction. I think as you get older perhaps you're interested in essays and biographies and things like that. I think it's just important to just read as much as you can.
Ronald Frame
#78. Inthehistorian'sview biography isa kindoffrogspawn it takes ten thousand biographies to make one small history.
Michael Holroyd
#79. Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page.
David Nicholls
#80. Oftentimes, if a writer really gets her hooks into me, I'll want to read interviews, or listen to an interview, or read a literary biography or a memoir of some kind. And doing so almost always deepens my enjoyment of the author and her work.
Brad Listi
#81. Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all.
Deepak Chopra
#82. 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
#83. On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.
Penelope Fitzgerald
#84. What would become of all historical biography if it was written only with consideration for other peoples' feelings?
Johannes Brahms
#85. Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.
Louis Fischer
#86. I've always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#87. The magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed on myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility.
Bronislaw Malinowski
#88. I'm reading Joe Eszterhas biography; it's fabulous. Every time he made a movie, he fought with the director or the producer over the ending.
Chris Matthews
#90. I do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject ...
Iris Origo
#91. The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.
Kitty Kelley
#92. If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots I would burn my [Gulliver's] Travels.
Jonathan Swift
#93. While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area.
Jerry B. Jenkins
#94. Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.
Charles Darwin
#95. I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.
John Green
#96. When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.
Valentina Knurova
#97. What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.
Varley O'Connor
#98. Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance ... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure.
David Levering Lewis
#99. A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.
H.G.Wells
#100. I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.
Mae West
