Biographies Quotations | Page 2

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.

Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility.

I read Michael Caine's biography. It was about him growing up

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.

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.

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.

I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.

Biography is the best form of history.

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

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.

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.

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

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It’s not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination.

All of our theology must eventually become biography.

Our theology must become biography.

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

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

Bob Hope was an entertainment colossus, shrewd and influential well beyond show business. Richard Zoglin's biography captures it all--the public and private Hope.

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

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

I grew up reading biographies on groups, and I love all that. The thing about biographies, it's the old cliché but it's true - a lot of the time these things are more about the author than they are about the group.

Almost any biography will have its useful suggestions for making life a success, but none better or more unfailing than the biography of Christ.

I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.

Somebody approached me about writing a biography on me, I told them they were too late.

The man who walks with Henslow.

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

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.

When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.

We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.

Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

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

A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.

History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons

There is no history; only biography.

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

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

There is properly no history, only biography.

All history is biography.

Your biography is not your destiny, your decisions are.

Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.

Biography is the only true history.

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

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

The parallel circumstances and kindred images to which we readily conform our minds are, above all other writings, to be found in the lives of particular persons, and therefore no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography.

The most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and ones own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)