Biographies Quotes · Page 4

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

— Claire Tomalin

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

— George Steiner

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.

— Henry Ward Beecher

[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.

— Bronislaw Malinowski

“Er lebte in mehreren Welten, und mehrere Welten leben in ihm.”

— Hans-Christian Oeser

I have my own biography of Gram Parsons - I don't want to be part of somebody else's.

— Emmylou Harris

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

— Fay Weldon

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the…

— Robert Caro

I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas,…

— Anonymous

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

— Clint Eastwood

The biography I've written about Wendy Wasserstein will almost invariably be different than the one anyone else would write.

— Julie Salamon

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

— Walter Lippmann

I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.

— Blake Bailey

A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man…

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

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

— Horace

Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the…

— Mark Frauenfelder

You have to get inside the people you are writing about. You have to go below the surface. And that's to a…

— David McCullough

If it had taught them nothing else, twenty years of living past high school had taught them self-preservation. ... No one was…

— Sharyn McCrumb

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

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is…

— Beatrix Potter

I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography.…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking…

— Virginia Woolf

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

That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well…

— Barack Obama

“July 7, 1986: Montreux It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized…

— Keith Haring

It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity.…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.s…

— Steven Chu

I am now a mother and a grandmother, and I do not recall that I have ever ignored the claims of the…

— Gertrude Kasebier

The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't…

— Francis Darwin

My first big acting performance was in the Marilyn Monroe biography piece, and it required frontal nudity. I talked to Mira Sorvino,…

— Ashley Judd

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…

— Henry Louis Gates

You ask whether I am going over to the history of science... no, I am not as old as that.

— Christopher Kelk Ingold

Serious biographies need to have a historical base in facts.

— Fred Kaplan

A musician's biography is written wherever he performs; everybody hears what he is playing.

— Sri Chinmoy

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.

— Thomas Carlyle

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

— Tom Stoppard

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

— Charles J. Shields

unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Your biography is not your destiny, your decisions are.

— Tony Robbins