Quotes About Biographies

#1. 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

#2. After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

Cynthia Ozick

#3. 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

#4. As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It's not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination.

Scott Lynch

#5. The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race.

Lynn Barber

#6. The biographies are very enlightening because you realise, Oh my God, all these people I've admired - and tried to emulate even - when I was younger died tragically from substance abuse.

Eva Mendes

#7. We make Rizal in our own image and likeness. Our image of Rizal is usually formed or deformed in school through numerous biographies with flattering titles.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#8. and I particularly loved biographies because they were about people who had to overcome obstacles or prejudices to get ahead. They made me think I could make it when nobody else believed in me, when even I didn't believe in myself.

Yeonmi Park

#9. Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be,

Lee Kuan Yew

#10. I greatly enjoy reading the biographies of scientists, and when doing so I always hope to learn the secrets of their success. Alas, those secrets generally remain elusive.

Jack W. Szostak

#11. When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

Walter Isaacson

#12. I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

John Green

#13. I enjoy biographies and whatnot. I'm also a fan of presidential libraries. I've visited quite a few of them, especially the more modern ones.

David Mandel

#14. I love reading - inspirational books, leadership books, biographies. I exercise a lot and put on my audio book. Even If you would offer me a million dollars for my iPod I wouldn't give it to you, because I have some great things on it.

Robin Sharma

#15. Two Drink Mike enjoys dancing and knows a magic trick. Whereas, No Drink Mike enjoys biographies, and has serious opinions on wildlife. And Five Drink Mike ... dances with wildlife.

Mike Birbiglia

#16. Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

Claire Tomalin

#17. Next to the Holy Scriptures, the greatest aide to the life of faith may be Christian biographies.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#18. Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the scientific geniuses who formerly owned them? I'll never look at a pigeon, a pearl, or a Wheatstone bridge the same way again.

Mark Frauenfelder

#19. In a fit at the bookstore one day, I bought all my favourite composers' biographies: Schubert, Massenet, Wolf. I've still not had a chance to read them; it breaks my heart. But when you travel so much, you just can't take that many books with you.

Danielle De Niese

#20. I don't plan on writing biographies of great sports stars who are still playing ball. But I did write one on Jackie Robinson, who was playing ball in the 20th century.

David A. Adler

#21. When I was growing up, I read Britney Spears' and Mariah Carey's biographies. I just wanted to see how they did it because I was so eager to get into the biz.

Pixie Lott

#22. I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.

Kitty Kelley

#23. Unloved women have no biographies
they have histories

F Scott Fitzgerald

#24. How do our experiences in childhood make us the adults we become? It is one of the great human questions, the theme of countless novels, biographies, and memoirs;

Paul Tough

#25. Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have ... This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.

Henry Louis Gates

#26. I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

Ben Elliot

#27. It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.

Iain M. Banks

#28. I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much.

Penelope Fitzgerald

#29. When we work on a piece of music, we'll often read the biographies of the composer and learn about what was going on historically and artistically. But I believe that the connection to a piece of music is something much more personal and mysterious than all of these bits of information.

Helene Grimaud

#30. My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low.

David Lagercrantz

#31. If one reads the biographies of physicists like Bohr, Heisenberg, Chandrashekhar, and Bethe, one gets the impression that without hikes in the mountains and the vision of night skies their science would not have amounted to much.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#32. I have very positive memories of reading biographies of unusual Americans as a child.

Chris Van Allsburg

#33. I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, 'Twilight,' also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families - real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.

Wynter Gordon

#34. My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.

Bill Paxton

#35. I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity.

Diane Setterfield

#36. I love reading. I'm very much into history, novels, biographies and I have a wide range of thrillers.

Bruno Tonioli

#37. There's been a number of erroneous biographies, articles and so on written about Billy and we both thought it would be a good idea to produce a true one.

Pamela Stephenson

#38. Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is instructive in painting a realistic portrayal of Lincoln and his methods for accomplishing his objectives. In fact, many good political biographies are useful in learning about power, strategy, and decision-making.

Jeffrey Pfeffer

#39. Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.

Louise Penny

#40. Hyperbolic myths of origin have from the earliest times served to lend a paradoxical plausibility to the biographies of heroes.

Michael Chabon

#41. My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug 'Vanity Fair.' You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.

Abigail Spencer

#42. I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.

Kathryn Harrison

#43. I used to devour biographies of people like Natalie Wood and Marilyn.

Emma Forrest

#44. It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

Antonia Fraser

#45. The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.

Anthony Powell

#46. 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

#47. I like a good fun chick-lit book as much as I like historical fiction, mysteries, or biographies, I like to be well-rounded!

Erin Duffy

#48. I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I'm reading biographies of Mahler.

Gustavo Dudamel

#49. The reason I moved to Nashville was because I was reading biographies of a lot of my country music heroes, and I thought it would be better to actually go where the history was, as opposed to just reading about it.

Lindi Ortega

#50. There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.

Julius Erving

#51. Biographies by preachers are of no value. If they admire a man they always make him a saint, while if they dislike one, they always make him a demon.

George C. Lorimer

#52. I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. I think biographies are very urgent to children.

Joan Didion

#53. I enjoy reading biographies because I want to know about the people who messed up the world.

Marie Dressler

#54. I couldn't find a decent threesome guidebook at the library, so I started scouring the Internet, reading biographies, and asking lots of people lots of questions. As it turns out, America is full of trisexuals eager to tell their stories.

Victoria Vantoch

#55. I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.

Al Sharpton

#56. For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

Alfred Nobel

#57. I like reading biographies because most of them are slightly similar, and it's voyeuristic, looking into someone's life.

Courtney Barnett

#58. We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

David Lagercrantz

#59. I love biographies. I'm especially into stuff about Hollywood in the '40s and '50s. I find it fascinating and terrifying.

Katie Findlay

#60. 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

#61. I don't write [screenplay character] biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.

John Sayles

#62. No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.

Anthony Marra

#63. If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they're often told from a political perspective.

Clint Eastwood

#64. It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'

Bernard Malamud

#65. I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

Jonathan Frakes

#66. He says unloved women have no biographies - they have histories." Anthony laughed again. "Surely

F Scott Fitzgerald

#67. INTRODUCTION. OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#68. My reading is always about musical biographies. I have an innate interest and passion for that.

Nina Blackwood

#69. Born evil? I know of no such person, even in the annals of crime or in the biographies of despots. The answer here is no.

Michael H. Stone

#70. There are biographies, I looked at a lot of photographs of him, I heard his voice over and over and over again. You get in there and get to know the man by all of those pieces of information.

David Strathairn

#71. History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Thomas Carlyle

#72. Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

A.S. Byatt

#73. When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

Michael Ondaatje

#74. Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

John Legend

#75. When I was younger I only read sports books. I loved the biographies that told how athletes developed. When I got into coaching, I did start to read more instructional books, but I was always more interested in the people behind the ideas.

Tony Dungy

#76. I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.

Luke Evans

#77. At the Sex Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, they were a phenomenal help, too. We went out there for a few days, and they gave us access to materials. And the biographies, there are four or five, ranging from very poor to excellent.

Liam Neeson

#78. I don't read biographies for moral instruction, or for a history lesson. I want to know what people are saying about me.

Bauvard

#79. Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.

Jeff Dunham

#80. My father, John Steinbeck, was a man who held human history in great reverence, and in particular the biographies of those people who had risked their lives, their fortunes, and their worldly honor to defend the rights and prerogatives of those who were powerless to defend themselves.

Thomas Steinbeck

#81. 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

#82. Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

Walter Lippmann

#83. Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

Claire Tomalin

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#87. 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

#88. Biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

Phyllis Rose

#89. I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.

Barbra Streisand

#90. I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.

Jamie Wyeth

#91. I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.

Wilbur Smith

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.

Blake Bailey

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. [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

#99. 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

#100. Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Claire Messud