quotes about Biographies
-
I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.
-- A. Scott Berg -
Tycho, we're about to achieve a tremendous victory we don't want." "We'll put that in your biography. General Antilles was so good he couldn't fail when he tried to." "Thanks." Wedge & Tycho
-- Aaron Allston -
[George] Uhlenbeck was a highly gifted physicist. One of his remarkable traits was he would read every issue of T%he Physical Review from cover to cover.
-- Abraham Pais -
-
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 -
For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.
-- Alfred Nobel -
In the old days, they killed the messenger who brought the bad news... a Cassandra is never popular in her time.
-- Alice Stewart -
History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine -
-
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 WhiteSource : ANDREW DICKSON WHITE (1910). “SEVEN GREAT STATESMEN IN THE WARFARE OF HUMANITY WITH UNREASON”
-
I got very keen on biography because I wanted to change it. I wanted to stretch the form. I think of it as a way of capturing souls.
-- Ann Wroe -
You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.
-- Anthony Marra -
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 PowellSource : Anthony Powell (2010). “Hearing Secret Harmonies: Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time”, p.84, University of Chicago Press
-
-
I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
-- Antonia Fraser -
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
-- Antonia Fraser -
A photograph is a biography of a moment.
-- Art ShaySource : "Photographs tell story of decades-long romance". Interview with Dean Reynolds, www.cbsnews.com. February 13, 2014.
-
Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
-- Arthur Balfour -
-
There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.
-- Arthur Wing PineroSource : Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1917). “The Social Plays of Arthur Wing Pinero”
-
My lectures were highly esteemed, but I am of opinion my operations rather kept down my practice, than increased it.
-- Astley Cooper -
The creative person should have no other biography than his works.
-- B. Traven -
I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.
-- Barbara Taylor Bradford -
-
I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.
-- Barbra Streisand -
[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.
-- Bronislaw MalinowskiSource : Bronislaw Malinowski (2001). “Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski”, p.6, Psychology Press
-
No sooner than I had begun to read this great work [Frasier, The Golden Bough], than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frasier, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.
-- Bronislaw Malinowski -
-
I love reading. I'm very much into history, novels, biographies and I have a wide range of thrillers.
-- Bruno Tonioli -
Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.
-- C.P. SnowSource : C.P. Snow (2010). “The Search”, p.15, House of Stratus
-
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 -
I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.
-- Carolyn Wells -
-
The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever.
-- Charles Darwin -
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 -
I possess every good quality, but the one that distinguishes me above all is modesty.
-- Charles Richet -
You ask whether I am going over to the history of science... no, I am not as old as that.
-- Christopher Kelk Ingold -
-
[Flürscheim] was good at unanswerable arguments.
-- Christopher Kelk Ingold -
I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn't tell it like it was.
-- Cilla Black -
Geniuses have the shortest biographies.
-- Claire MessudSource : Claire Messud (2015). “The Emperor's Children: Picador Classic”, p.288, Pan Macmillan
-
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 -
-
What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.
-- Conrad Veidt -
Any good biography has to got to lead you to the work. Many biographers have started out in love with their subjects and ended up hating them.
-- D. T. MaxSource : Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
-
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 SteinkeSource : "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.
-
I've had three biographies made about my life so people know an awful lot about me.
-- David Cassidy -
-
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 -
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 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 GaskellSource : Elizabeth Gaskell (2009). “The Life of Charlotte Brontë”, p.10, OUP Oxford
-
I have my own biography of Gram Parsons - I don't want to be part of somebody else's.
-- Emmylou Harris -
-
Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.
-- Eric Bentley -
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 José -
There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.
-- Fay Weldon -
I read Michael Caine's biography. It was about him growing up
-- Frank Lampard -
-
It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
-- George Plimpton -
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
-- George Steiner -
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 -
A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.
-- Harold RosenbergSource : 1952 'TheAmerican Action Painters', in Art News, no.51, Dec.
-
-
[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you.
-- Henry James -
Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography.
-- Henry Louis Gates -
A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.
-- Henry Ward Beecher -
-
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
-- Hilaire Belloc -
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 -
I do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject ...
-- Iris Origo -
[On writing biography:] If you wish to see a person you must not start by seeing through him.
-- Iris OrigoSource : Iris Origo (1984). “A Need to Testify”, p.37, Helen Marx Books
-
-
Behind each biography there should always be a rich treasury of unformulated knowledge, a tapestry that has not been unrolled.
-- Iris Origo -
May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.
-- James M. Barrie -
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
-- James McBride -
-
When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
-- Jane Campion -
Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.
-- Jeff Dunham -
Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
-- John ArbuthnotSource : Letter to Jonathan Swift, 13 Jan. 1733
-
John looked ruddy and plump, with a pair of cheeks like a trumpeter.
-- John ArbuthnotSource : John Arbuthnot (2006). “History of John Bull”, p.83, ReadHowYouWant.com
-
-
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 -
I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.
-- Jonathan Dimbleby -
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset -
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.
-- Joseph Campbell -
-
The biography I've written about Wendy Wasserstein will almost invariably be different than the one anyone else would write.
-- Julie Salamon -
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 -
Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.
-- Kate Braverman -
-
I am a total sucker for an actor's autobiography/biography. I have probably read most of them.
-- Kate Fleetwood -
I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
-- Katherine Anne Porter -
I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography.
-- Kathy Griffin -
Live your life as if you are writing your Biography.
-- Keshia Chante -
-
The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.
-- Kitty KelleySource : "Unauthorized, But Not Untrue" by Kitty Kelley, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 6, 2010.
-
I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.
-- Kitty KelleySource : "Kelley softens tone in new books" by Patrick Gavin, www.politico.com. February 07, 2013.
-
I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress... It's like a secret society up there.
-- Kitty KelleySource : "Kelley pulls curtain back on Camelot" by Patrick Gavin, www.politico.com. December 17, 2012.
-
This is the best biography by me I have ever read.
-- Lawrence Welk -
-
Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.
-- Louis Fischer -
The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race.
-- Lynn Barber -
Discretion is not the better part of biography.
-- Lytton StracheySource : In Michael Holroyd 'Lytton Strachey' vol. 1 (1967) preface
-
John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.
-- Mark Shields -
-
I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.
-- Martin Lewis Perl -
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 -
I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.
-- Nancy Horan -
Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography.Boswell was one ofthesmallest menthat ever lived and he has beaten them all.
-- Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild -
-
Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne -
The facts of a person's life will, like murder, come out.
-- Norman Sherry -
All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.
-- Norman Spinrad -
-
A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.
-- Osip Mandelstam -
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 -
When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.
-- Paul Dirac -
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 KendallSource : Paul Murray Kendall (1965). “The Art of Biography”, New York, Norton
-