Biographies Quotes

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

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art - she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent's Park, rain in the street outside - a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

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

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

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves. ~ Simone Weil

For my part I am persuaded the more light we have, the more we see our own sinfulness: the nearer we get to heaven, the more we are clothed with humility. In every age of the Church you will find it true, if you will study biographies, that the most eminent saints - men like Bradford, Rutherford, and McCheyne - have always been the humblest men. On ~ J.C. Ryle

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

[On writing biography:] If you wish to see a person you must not start by seeing through him. ~ Iris Origo

By the study of their biographies, we receive each man as a guest into our minds, and we seem to understand their character as the result of a personal acquaintance, because we have obtained from their acts the best and most important means of forming an opinion about them. "What greater pleasure could'st thou gain than this?" What more valuable for the elevation of our own character? ~ Plutarch

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies. ~ Claire Tomalin

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

Are you feeling helpless when you think about the dark roads of the future? Then read the biographies of the great men! Learn their life stories; they will lead you to the light! Buddha will lead you to the light; Gandhi will lead you to the light! Men of wider horizons will broaden our own horizons! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I read these biographies all the time about these successful people and one of the patterns that I've discovered, and what I've discovered in myself and all of my friends who have become very successful, has been the fact that they say "Yes" to a lot of commitments.

If you just have this one goal, then that one thing may get shoved under the rug and procrastinated on. But if you say yes to a lot of things; if you almost overcommit, then you probably won't get all of the things you've committed to complete. But you'll get a good portion of them. The 80% that you DO get done will still be more than that one person who said no to a lot of things. The busiest people get the most things done. ~ David Tian Ph.D

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

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy. ~ Anthony Marra

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

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

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

The first thing that sometimes keeps next generation leaders from playing to their strengths is that the idea of being a balanced or well-rounded leader looks good on paper and sounds compelling coming from behind a lectern, but in reality, it is an unworthy endeavor. Read the biographies of the achievers in any arena of life. You will find over and over that these were not "well-rounded" leaders. They were men and women of focus. ~ Andy Stanley

I've had three biographies made about my life so people know an awful lot about me. ~ David Cassidy

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

I seldom read anything that is not of a factual nature because I want to invest my time wisely in the things that will improve my life. Don't misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with reading purely for the joy of it. Novels have their place, but biographies of famous men and women contain information that can change lives. ~ Zig Ziglar

Nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in a distant country. ~ Charles Darwin

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

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

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both. ~ Michael Holroyd

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

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

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine. ~ Fernando Pessoa

A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy. ~ Robert Caro

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

Bottom line: you never ever saw him looking wrong. Knowing this, I felt a cold shiver down my spine when I read in the Minneapolis StarTribune that when his body was found in the elevator at Paisley Park, "Prince was wearing a black shirt and pants - both were on backward - and his socks were inside out."

This made no sense to me. The sheer irony of it broke my heart all over again. ~ Mayte Garcia

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had "just always been placed there." The longer he pondered booksellers' indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. "Thinking about it made me angry," Josephy wrote in his autobiography, "and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult. ~ Bobby Bridger

Somebody approached me about writing a biography on me, I told them they were too late. ~ Zach Braff

Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely. ~ David McCullough

We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically - as Amy Lowell loved Keats - and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span - in their protoplasmic continuities - the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men. ~ Hans Zinsser

Among religious writings the Bible is unique in its attitude to its great men. Even many Christian biographies puff up the men they describe. But the Bible exhibits the whole man, so much so that it is almost embarrassing at times. If we would teach our children to read the Bible truly, it would be a good vaccination against cynical realism from the non-Christian side, because the Bible portrays its characters as honestly as any debunker or modern cynic ever could. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

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

All of our theology must eventually become biography. ~ Tim Hansel

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

John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica. Long considered the supreme English poet, Milton experienced a dip in popularity after attacks by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis in the mid 20th century; but with multiple societies and scholarly journals devoted to his study, Milton's reputation remains as strong as ever in the 21st century. Very soon after his death – and continuing to the present day – Milton became the subject of partisan biographies, confirming T.S. Eliot's belief that "of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions…making unlawful entry." Milton's radical, republican politics and heretical religious views, coupled with the perceived artificiality of his complicated Latinate verse, alienated Eliot and other readers; yet by dint of the overriding influence of his poetry and personality on subsequent generations - particularly the Romantic movement - the man whom Samuel Johnson disparaged as "an acrimonious and surly republican" must be counted one of the most significant writers and thinkers of all time. Source: Wikipedia ~ John Milton

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

I studied history in college, and I've always enjoyed reading, especially political biographies, and I can state that in all my studies and all my experiences, I have come across just one truly honest politician: my great-grandfather, William Eichner. ... According to my grandmother, when he was elected to the General Assembly, he stopped going to religious services and never set foot in a church during his two terms in office, stating, "You can't serve God and politics at the same time". ~ John W. Hartmann

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked. ~ H.G.Wells

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect
a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known. ~ Robert Adams

Tyndall, ... I must remain plain Michael Faraday to the last; and let me now tell you, that if accepted the honour which the Royal Society desires to confer upon me, I would not answer for the integrity of my intellect for a single year. ~ Michael Faraday

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

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

The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race. ~ Lynn Barber

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

Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation-the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west. ~ David Levering Lewis

My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life. ~ Justin Hayward

Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean? ... in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler. ~ Horace

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

I wish I had my beta-blockers handy. ~ James Black

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane. ~ Colm Toibin

Some read biographies of famous Christians to try to short-cut themselves into a deeper walk with the Lord and successful ministry. They think: "If I just copy some of their techniques, beliefs, and quotes, I will have their success." Such thinking, though, creates men who trust in the past work of other believers, living out of their zeal instead of tapping into the actual power of God which these men had. True men of God are only signposts to point the way. Their sign should point to heaven, to the Lord himself. ~ Greg Gordon

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

This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity. ~ Antoine Lavoisier

I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing. ~ Hilary Mantel

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men. ~ Virginia Woolf

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die. ~ Fay Weldon

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

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. ~ Edmund White

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life. ~ Susan Isaacs

We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies. ~ Henry David Thoreau

At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor ... I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world. After I had learned the fifth proposition, my brother told me that it was generally considered difficult, but I had found no difficulty whatsoever. This was the first time it had dawned on me that I might have some intelligence. ~ Bertrand Russell

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

Remember the movie 'The Matrix,' where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won't always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the faces of the people we talk to, and we will see subtitles if they speak a foreign language. ~ Michio Kaku

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term. ~ Robert Caro

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

As an actor, you're constantly searching for that great character. Also, being a history buff and learning about people in our past and amazing things that they've done, I came across a book about Howard Hughes and he was set up as basically, the most multi-dimensional character I could ever come across. Often, people have tried to define him in biographies, but no one seems to be able to categorize him. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio

A few years later, Mendeleev, now famous, divorced his wife and wanted to remarry. Although the conservative local church said he had to wait seven years, he bribed a priest and got on with the nuptials. This technically made him a bigamist, but no one dared arrest him. When a local bureaucrat complained to the tsar about the double standard applied to the case- the priest was defrocked-the tsar primly replied, I admit, Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev. ~ Sam Kean

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.' ~ Stacy Schiff

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

He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It's hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he's drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character's psychological understanding. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

The pa system has broken down. Society has broken down. ~ Theresa Sjoquist

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. ~ Carl Jung

I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era. ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

Heinrich Zimmerhe had a little saying : The best things cant be told - because they are transcendent, inexpressible truths. The second best are misunderstood : myths, which are metaphoric attempts to point to the way toward the first. And the third best have to do with history, science, biography, and so on. The only kind of talking that can be understood is this last kind. ~ Joseph Campbell

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

I used to devour biographies of people like Natalie Wood and Marilyn. ~ Emma Forrest

Biography should be written by an acute enemy. ~ Arthur Balfour

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

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it. ~ William Golding

We're all shaped to some degree by our own biographies and cultures and it's easy to believe that what's happened before determines what has to come next. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson thought otherwise. "What lies behind us," he wrote, "and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Finding your Element is about discovering what lies within you and, in doing so, transforming what lies before you. "Risk ~ Ken Robinson

Unloved women have no biographies
they have histories ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

[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

The man who walks with Henslow. ~ Charles Darwin

I thought to myself, who is this excellent man Van Doren who being employed to teach literature, teaches just that: talks about writing and about books and poems and plays: does not get off on a tangent about the biographies of the poets or novelists: does not read into their poems a lot of subjective messages which were never there? Who is this man who does not have to fake and cover up a big gulf of ignorance by teaching a lot of opinions and conjectures and useless facts that belong to some other subject? Who is this who really loves what he has to teach, and does not secretly detest all literature, and abhor poetry, while pretending to be a professor of it?...It was because of this virtual scholasticism of Mark's that he would never permit himself to fall into the naive errors of those who try to read some favorite private doctrine into every poet they like of ever nation or every age. And Mark abhorred the smug assurance with which second-rate left-wing critics find adumbrations of dialectical materialism in everyone who ever wrote from Homer and Shakespeare to whomever they happen to like in recent times. If the poet is to their fancy, then he is clearly seen to be preaching the class struggle. If they do not like him, then they are able to show that he was really a forefather of fascism. And all their literary heroes are revolutionary leaders, and all their favorite villains are capitalists and Nazis. ~ Thomas Merton

I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor. ~ Conrad Veidt