Biographies Quotes · Page 5

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

— Hilary Mantel

Political science without biography is a form of taxidermy.

— Harold Lasswell

People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don't buy studies of presidencies.

— H. W. Brands

Women inspire me... so I enjoy women's stories and biographies. I am interested in all women.

— Diane von Furstenberg

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.

— Harold Rosenberg

“Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.”

— Deana J. Driver

I've always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.

— Seth Grahame-Smith

Next to the Holy Scriptures, the greatest aide to the life of faith may be Christian biographies.

— Aiden Wilson Tozer

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it…

— John Dominic Crossan

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

— Lynn Barber

He - A.J.[Muste] never got much credit, never got much attention. For example, I wrote a biography of him and nobody ever…

— Nat Hentoff

It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'

— Bernard Malamud

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…

— Michael Eisner

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

— Michael Ondaatje

The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.

— Kitty Kelley

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you…

— Penelope Fitzgerald

I do not want to write beyond this point, because those days when I studied relentlessly are nostalgic to me; and on…

— Hideki Yukawa

Tyndall, ... I must remain plain Michael Faraday to the last; and let me now tell you, that if accepted the honour…

— Michael Faraday

“Bottom line: you never ever saw him looking wrong. Knowing this, I felt a cold shiver down my spine when I read…

— Mayte Garcia

Unfortunately, I'm not a history buff. I don't read biographies, except of some of those writers whom I've collected over the years…

— John Larroquette

My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people…

— Justin Hayward

According to Gandhi, the seven sins are wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity,…

— Jimmy Carter

Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is instructive in painting a realistic portrayal of Lincoln and his methods for accomplishing his objectives.…

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

I didn’t think any biography could do justice to one of the few honest-to-goodness geniuses of our time, a walking paradox who…

— Otto Penzler

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range…

— William Golding

“[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain…

— Roland Barthes

This is a glorious biography ... The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on…

— Mark Bostridge

Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial…

— Cornel West

The second volume of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka . . . [is] a tangle of counter-grained and often under-sourced…

— Steve Donoghue

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his…

— Mark Twain

This needs to work on that level, but it has the additional strain of it's going to be profoundly scrutinized by political…

— James Ponsoldt

In a world of alternative lifestyle options, strategic life planning becomes of special importance. Like lifestyle patterns, life plans of one kind…

— Anthony Giddens

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

— Robert Caro

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

— Thomas Carlyle

Writing a biography is not a love affair. It’s not a marriage. It’s a job, it’s a piece of work.

— Hermione Lee

The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever.

— Charles Darwin

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

— Virginia Woolf

Six-hundred-page biographies of German theologians aren't known to fly off the shelves.

— Eric Metaxas

John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.

— Mark Shields

What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.

— Pierre-Simon Laplace