Biographies Quotes · Page 22

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

— Alfred Nobel

I have always liked reading biographies. It is the ideal literary genre for someone too prim, like me, to acknowledge a gossipy…

— Jill Tweedie

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be…

— Elizabeth Gaskell

Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about…

— Claire Tomalin

I wanted to make a film that wasn't just a biography. When you watched it, you actually felt that you watched a…

— Tamra Davis

I grew up reading biographies on groups, and I love all that. The thing about biographies, it's the old cliché but it's…

— Stevie Jackson

I possess every good quality, but the one that distinguishes me above all is modesty.

— Charles Richet

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one…

— Susan Sontag

I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research…

— Luke Evans

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

— Iris Origo

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

— H. G. Wells

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

— Antonia Fraser

Let me tell you how at one time the famous mathematician Euclid became a physician. It was during a vacation, which I…

— Bernard Bolzano

Elizabeth Rothra's excellent biography of Charles Torrey Simpson restates his philosophies about the intrinsic value of natural ecosystems like the Everglades. No…

— Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography…

— Mark Twain

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task…

— C. Wright Mills

Our theology must become biography.

— Tim Hansel

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

— Enrico Fermi

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full…

— Janet Malcolm

For a while I got into the South Pacific theater of World War II. I read "American Caesar" by William Manchester, the…

— Dave Barry

We're artists. We cry out to be exploited on some level. Write a dissertation on my work. Write a biography about me.

— Scott McClanahan

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

— Eric Bentley

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

— Ben Elliot

Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium. Said to have been written as a schoolboy…

— E. C. Bentley