Biography Quotations

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

I rely on my iPad for on-the-go entertainment. I stock it with TV shows, like 'Parks and Recreation' and the British version of 'The Office.' I'm reading a Charles Manson biography on it too, since I'm weirdly into true crime.

When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.

I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.

My first biography was 'Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.' To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.

I want the 'Book of Basketball' to do well if only so I can shop an absolutely ridiculous topic for my next book: like, a book about basketball cards, or an unauthorized biography of A. J. Daulerio.

For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.

John Quincy Adams ranks with Jimmy Carter on the roster of ex-presidential redemption. Instead of completing a biography of his father, he let himself be elected to the House, where he spent nine terms in Whiggish opposition to the Democrats, supporting a national bank and a protective tariff and internal improvements.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening.

It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.

When I made the decision to go ahead with the project, I said I was going to try and write as if no other biography of Lincoln had yet been written.

Mental illnesses involve biological brain disorders, no matter what Tom Cruise says,

No one had done a biography of General Blunt before. He seemed interesting enough to sustain the book, and I found some interesting things about him that haven't appeared in other histories of the area that had mentioned General Blunt.

I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'

I don't think my writing has much to do with my age. For me, my biography is more about what I was reading at what age. It's more of an intellectual thing of wanting to be free to write and think without being too bound by categorisation. I don't think I'm made for these times; I feel more like an old-fashioned writer.

He has a biography that makes clear that he grew away from the (leftist) scene, and he's done great work for our country.

He was one of the first to treat these people as serious American writers, ... Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac.

He was enormously manipulative, very ambitious and not always truthful. I didn't want a biography that worships the title character. I wanted a movie that portrays the truth.

King Juan Carlos would be worthy of a full biography as a major player in his country's history. Alas, my Spanish is not good enough to offer myself!

Last fall I finished a biography of Jim Lane and that has been accepted by Pelican and will be out in the future. He was the leader of the free state movement during the Bleeding Kansas era and was one of Kansas? first two senators. Missouri history buffs might remember him and his Lane Brigade as the ones who participated in the burning of Osceola.

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

I was ready to do a biography, ... But obviously, I was challenged by the daunting prospect of getting him to do it. I had no real confidence. There was nothing about my approach that I thought would convince him.

Merkel's biography does not embody the experience of most women, ... They are concerned with how they can have a family and a job, whether they should stay home for a few years after the birth, or how they can best raise their children.

You live your life as a biography and you have chapters and how you handle yourself in time of adversity and crises defines you.

Well, it would not even have to be a chemical or biological or nuclear weapon. Because the only thing separating that container yard from basically where people live and work is a fence.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

When I was working on the unauthorized biography 'Stan Musial: An American Life,' which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

When candidates introduce themselves through biography, it invites voters in in a unique way, a way of relating to people in their own lives and experiences.

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

We might have had our biological families, but this was our extended family. Everyone was a brother or a sister. She was our mother.

We expected 'Living History' to be the best-selling biography of the summer and think the momentum will continue through the fall.

Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.

Biography tends to tilt history, because every person you are writing about becomes larger than life.

Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

I've only cried at one book, but I'm too embarrassed to tell you which. It wasn't terribly intellectual. I will admit, though, to crying when I've read books aloud to my elementary class. We read a biography of Gandhi once, and it was very difficult to read the part where Gandhi was killed, because they were waiting for a happy ending.

The support for Gore comes much more quickly and much more easily once voters get a sense of who he is. Until they understand something about his motivation and his biography and his background, it is difficult for voters to get a handle on him outside of the image of a vice president.

The songs will tell a story that I have imagined existing between the lines of Andersen's biography and some of his most famous tales, ... They speak of a misfit's love for an unattainable woman and a struggle between a huckster and someone who composes music in secret.

Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.

Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.

The most frequent thing people said to me about Princess Diana when I was conducting interviews for my biography was that she could create a circle of intimacy in the middle of a crowd.

The way we should take life is to ensure that if a biography is ever written about us, that it is a bloody good read.

This is an authorized biography, and a lot of readers may suspect that that means that it will treat Neil with kid gloves, ... That's not the case. Neil gave me complete freedom of interpretation and analysis. All he wanted to do was have input to make sure my facts were straight.

They don't pile up too much oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrate or phosphate. Those are kept under some kind of biological control. That's how the past has been. The big issue is, will the future work that way?

There's an overwhelming amount of material, ... You have to choose. It's a creative act, and also subjective, so the author of a biography paints his or her own portrait. And you want to make that an interesting read and well written.

A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.

It wasn't until (Dew) wrote the biography that we really found out a lot about what he had been doing. We just never felt that what he was doing was particularly difficult or meaningful. We were just normal.

The biography was a personal quest to understand Janis and to sort what was real from stories that were embellished,

The atomic age made its debut at Hiroshima in the middle of our work. Overnight, the biography of the founder of the new system of physics read differently.

I'm actually recording for PBS, doing some pickups for a narration I did on Chicago. When you're doing a biography of a town, I'm your voice!

I'm completely absorbed by Peter Guralnick's definitive, two-part biography of Elvis Presley: 'Last Train To Memphis' and 'Careless Love.' Meticulously researched, this is a compelling mix of history, myth-busting, and, of course, some timeless music.

I had a chance to read his biography, ... He was a fierce competitor, very acrobatic and obviously very brave, not wearing a mask most of his career. I'm just honored to be tied with him.

I had a chance to read his biography,

If you look at what we've done to date, we've nearly doubled our investments in chemical and biological defenses. We've implemented any number of important organizational changes to address the challenges that are posed by WMD more effectively.

I like vampires, tuberculosis, anything to do with blood. Then I read a biography of Rasputin and found out he'd had this daughter who had become a famous lion tamer and been billed as the daughter of the mad monk who was able to hypnotize animals with her eyes. It gave me a vision.

I realized what a special actor he was, so I proposed to Life magazine to do a visual biography on Dean, who exemplified the kind of actors who were starting to become popular back then.

I felt that Desmond was the last major soloist of his era about whom there hadn't been a biography,

I don't think there are many Capote letters that I have not seen for my biography and for 'Too Brief a Treat.' But there are undoubtedly some that I have not seen and that I hope will come to light someday.

He came attached to the case. ... I didn't know much about his biography before I started, and I hadn't read him since I was 20, I suppose. But in the process of research and writing, I found him to be a very admirable and a moral and warmhearted person.

You know, the chances of there being a nuclear or biological event in Monroe are slim but there is a chance of a chemical disaster simply because of all the industries we have in the area that use a wide variety of chemicals, ... So this really reinforces the importance of our ability to collaborate with other agencies.

This is not a biography, ... It's just stories, you know. And the ones I chose to leave out need a lot more detail.

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

The Lindbergh biography is fantastic. I just read it. And I loved it.

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or place. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd.

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.

Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's 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.

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.