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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I've had three biographies made about my life so people know an awful lot about me.
David Cassidy
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.
Charles J. Shields
#13. Biographies of British pop celebrities are terrible.
Mick Jagger
#14. However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.
Charles Wheelan
#19. 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
#21. Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Walter Lippmann
#22. Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
Claire Tomalin
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#26. 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
#27. Biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.
Phyllis Rose
#28. I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.
Barbra Streisand
#29. I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.
Jamie Wyeth
#30. I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.
Wilbur Smith
#31. 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
#32. [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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
Walter Isaacson
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.
Blake Bailey
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.
Colm Toibin
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.
Kate Zambreno
#49. 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
#50. Inthehistorian'sview biography isa kindoffrogspawn it takes ten thousand biographies to make one small history.
Michael Holroyd
#51. Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page.
David Nicholls
#52. Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all.
Deepak Chopra
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I've always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#56. The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.
Kitty Kelley
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.
Mae West
#61. I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.
Wole Soyinka
#62. The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner
#63. There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.
Flannery O'Connor
#64. I am a huge fan of biographies. What I'm always looking for is a story. I want a story I have never heard from anyone else.
Brandon Stanton
#65. Women inspire me ... so I enjoy women's stories and biographies. I am interested in all women.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#66. I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.
Blake Bailey
#67. The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
Christine Quinn
#68. Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.
Alice Oswald
#69. Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
Claire Tomalin
#70. I do read on holiday, but it tends to be very lowbrow. I'm into really camp biographies, and I'm a shameless fan of Jilly Cooper.
Miranda Raison
#71. Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.
Deana J. Driver
#72. I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
Claire Tomalin
#73. Unusual financial activity: none, unless you count the fact that someone in the family is way too into Civil War biographies. (Can this be a possible indication of Confederate insurgents still living and working in Virginia? Must research further.)
Ally Carter
#74. I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.
Nancy Horan
#75. We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.
Henry David Thoreau
#76. The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#77. I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.
Susan Isaacs
#78. There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Flannery O'Connor
#79. On the other hand, when I give it closer thought, I realize I'm not enough of a dictator to conduct an orchestra because it requires a pretty awful person. When you read these biographies of famous conductors, they are all awful people who fail in their private relationships.
Eberhard Weber
#80. When I read biographies, I'm only interested in the first few chapters. I'm not interested in when people become successful. I'm interested in what made them successful.
Michael Eisner
#81. My gift, if that's not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them.
Michael Dirda
#82. 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
#83. Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.
Jeff Dunham
#84. I don't read biographies for moral instruction, or for a history lesson. I want to know what people are saying about me.
Bauvard
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.
Michael Ondaatje
#90. 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
#91. History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. My reading is always about musical biographies. I have an innate interest and passion for that.
Nina Blackwood
#95. 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
#96. He says unloved women have no biographies - they have histories." Anthony laughed again. "Surely
F Scott Fitzgerald
#97. 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
#98. It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
Bernard Malamud
#99. 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
#100. 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
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