Biographies Quotes · Page 21

The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose…

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots I would burn my [Gulliver's] Travels.

— Jonathan Swift

The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesnt discover the…

— Leon Edel

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Lynn Barber

In the old days, they killed the messenger who brought the bad news... a Cassandra is never popular in her time.

— Alice Stewart

I did a lot before [being cast] because I knew how important it would be for playing somebody real, or attempting to…

— Vanessa Kirby

There were, like, 20 of [Jackie Kennedy's biographies], which was interesting because they are not exactly high literature - they are pulpy.But…

— Natalie Portman

There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.

— Henry David Thoreau

[Herschel and Humboldt] stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of…

— Charles Darwin

If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree.…

— Clint Eastwood

Computer chips will cost about a penny. That's the cost of scrap paper. The Internet will be basically for free and it…

— Michio Kaku

I read a lot of biographies, and so much is just so boring or so, like, 'Why did you say that?'

— Steve Lukather

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to…

— William Golding

I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are…

— Richard Lewis

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

— Fay Weldon

Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. They were, probably, the best men in their generation, and…

— Henry David Thoreau

All of Robert Caro's biographies are exceptional, in part because of Caro's fundamental ambivalence about power. He sees its necessity and use…

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do…

— Flannery O'Connor

If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet…

— Thomas Carlyle

I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.

— Paul Dirac

If you read the biography of any great man, you will always notice two things: His mother's contribution in his progress and…

— Narendra Modi

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

— Lee Kuan Yew

For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.

— Rachel Holmes