Biographies Quotes by Tim Hansel, Theodor Haecker, Clara Barton, Charles Darwin, Claire Tomalin, Joseph Brodsky and many others.
A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.
But nothing ever put ‘Hoppy’ in the shade. No one could fail to recognize in the little figure… the authentic gold of intellectual inspiration, the Fundator et Primus Abbas of biochemistry in England.
Along with all those books about Lincoln, Obama might read some biographies of Napoleon. The general who established the Legion d’Honneur understood that people fought as much for medals as for morals.
I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore‘s biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.
I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn’t tell it like it was.
Elizabeth Rothra’s excellent biography of Charles Torrey Simpson restates his philosophies about the intrinsic value of natural ecosystems like the Everglades. No one knew better than he the history of the plants and animals of South Florida or conveyed it with more humor and enthusiasm.
His [Erwin SchrГ¶dinger’s] private life seemed strange to bourgeois people like ourselves. But all this does not matter. He was a most lovable person, independent, amusing, temperamental, kind and generous, and he had a most perfect and efficient brain.
There’s no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
When I was younger, when I was at school, I did read a lot of fiction. I think as you get older perhaps you’re interested in essays and biographies and things like that. I think it’s just important to just read as much as you can.
That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous – I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist – for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.
I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I’m reading biographies of Mahler.
Serious biographies need to have a historical base in facts.
The facts of a person’s life will, like murder, come out.
I can find my biography in every fable that I read.
Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.
Ironically, Henry James‘ biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing I have Ted, will have children but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn’t read him.
Let This Voice Be Heard fulfills the mandate of biography at its best because Maurice Jackson has captured the history of a great moral movement‘s origins in a single, extraordinary life. An indispensable addition to the antislavery bibliography.
Biographies of British pop celebrities are terrible.
There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good.
I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.
I read a lot. I especially read memoirs and biographies. It’s very helpful when you’re thinking about what’s possible and what exists in human behavior; if it exists out there then it can exist on the stage. I really try to go to a lot of concerts. A lot of live events. I just try to keep my ears really, really open.
I love reading – inspirational books, leadership books, biographies. I exercise a lot and put on my audio book. Even If you would offer me a million dollars for my iPod I wouldn’t give it to you, because I have some great things on it.
I’ve always been a person that thinks nonfiction is more interesting than fiction, I love to read presidential biographies.
A form of art that I like is portraiture. I’ve been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.
The best interviews like the best biographies should sing the strangeness and variety of the human race.
Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
My first biography written in ’73 was not ‘Journey To The Moon.’ It was ‘Return To Earth.’ Because for me, that was the more difficult task – disappointment.
Biography lends to death a new terror.
Jean Toomer is a phantom of the Harlem Renaissance. Pick up any general study of the literature written by Afro-Americans, and there is the name of Jean Toomer. In biographies and memoirs of Harlem Renaissance figures, his name is invoked as if he had been one of the sights along Lenox Avenue.
Biography is the best form of history.
A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
Don’t be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don’t let others discourage you or tell you that you can’t do it. In my day I was told women didn’t go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn’t.
Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
I read everything that Tolkien wrote, and also read biographies of him. I was fascinated by his experiences in World War I, which includes the loss of life of some of his very, very close friends. I think he writes about that a lot in ‘The Hobbit‘ and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’
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 have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I’m going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.
Good people are seldom fully recognised during their lifetimes, and here, there are serious problems of corruption. One day it will be realised that my findings should have been acknowledged. It was difficult, but she always smiled when asked why she went on when recognition eluded her in her own country.
Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it.
[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you.
According to Nietzche,” said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, “philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.
I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.
The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.
At the Sex Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, they were a phenomenal help, too. We went out there for a few days, and they gave us access to materials. And the biographies, there are four or five, ranging from very poor to excellent.
It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.
biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
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 in what made them successful.
But the involuntary tricks of memory and the voluntary ones of imagination make always such terrible havoc of facts that truth, be it ever so much sought and cared for, appears in history and biography only in a more or less disfigured condition.
I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone’s life.
I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.
There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.
Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections, and other data.
The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness.
The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.
All history is biography.
I had lost faith in biography.
I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.
I enjoy reading biographies because I want to know about the people who messed up the world.
Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it’s a very interesting political ploy.
I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say “This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln” whatever. But you don’t make any such supposition when you say “This is a historical novel.”
I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.
No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution – and himself – so it’s unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.
Tycho, we’re about to achieve a tremendous victory we don’t want.” “We’ll put that in your biography. General Antilles was so good he couldn’t fail when he tried to.” “Thanks.” Wedge & Tycho
I’m getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don’t give the poor chap a chance…the Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography.
A woman’s biography – with about eight famous historical exceptions – so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.
[FlГјrscheim] was good at unanswerable arguments.
[On writing biography:] … every human life is at once so complex and so simple, so perplexing and so clear, so superficial and so profound, that any attempt to present it as a unified, consistent whole, to enclose it within a rigid frame, inevitably tempts one to cheat or to falsify.
Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.
I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I’m writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.
A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.
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 – particularly Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller, people like Charles Bukowski and John Fante and David Foster Wallace.
Biography is the only true history.
Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.
I’m not fond of biographies. I don’t like writing about myself.
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
When I was a boy, I began writing a biography of Shakespeare, and since then I’ve written a number of biographies of actors and famous people.
Occasionally a single anecdote opens a character; biography has its comparative anatomy, and a saying or a sentiment enables the skilful hand to construct the skeleton.
I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can’t interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they’re gone and people are more willing to talk about them.
For a while I got into the South Pacific theater of World War II. I read “American Caesar” by William Manchester, the biography of General MacArthur. Because of that I ended up reading “Tales of the South Pacific” by James Michener and then because of that reading his “Hawaii.” That is what happens.
Since my mother is the type that’s called schizophrenogenic in the literature-she’s the one who makes crazy people, crazy children-I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.
There is properly no history, only biography.
We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies-all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.
Most people when they have autobiographies, they’re not autobiographies, they’re biographies written by a ghost writer.
Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so – look at the Bible, crammed with biographies, very popular reading.
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.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.
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.
I got a four year scholarship to Harvard, and while I was there they wanted to groom me for work in the Star Wars program designing weapons ignited by hydrogen bombs. I didn’t want to do that. I thought about how many scientists had died in World War II.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
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.
I don’t think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.
If you read the biography of any great man, you will always notice two things: His mother’s contribution in his progress and his teacher‘s contribution in his growth and development.
The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.
There is no history; only biography.
If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.
Biography – a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.
Always live your life with your biography in mind,” Dad was fond of saying. “Naturally, it won’t be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.
I love biographies. I’m especially into stuff about Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s. I find it fascinating and terrifying.
All of our theology must eventually become biography.
A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson’s biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It’s first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing.
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.
Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels,–teaching high living ,high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and, the world’s good.
Your biography becomes your biology.
The poetic beauty of Davy’s mind never seems to have left him. To that circumstance I would ascribe the distinguishing feature in his character, and in his discoveries,-a vivid imagination sketching out new tracts in regions unexplored, for the judgement to select those leading to the recesses of abstract truth.
Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.
All Philosophy is Biography
A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.
As a business consultant, I am a voracious reader of self-help books, case studies of thriving companies, and the biographies and autobiographies of the world’s most successful people. I relentlessly implement the best ideas into my businesses.
Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.
I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
The magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed on myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.
Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.
What use is there for a biography of myself? I’m just a movie actor.
Well, in the first place, it leads to great anxiety as to whether it’s going to be correct or not … I expect that’s the dominating feeling. It gets to be rather a fever… At age 60, when asked about his feelings on discovering the Dirac equation.
My father, John Steinbeck, was a man who held human history in great reverence, and in particular the biographies of those people who had risked their lives, their fortunes, and their worldly honor to defend the rights and prerogatives of those who were powerless to defend themselves.
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn’t be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
What would become of all historical biography if it was written only with consideration for other peoples’ feelings?
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
I’ve published many biographies over the years and enjoyed working with writers on their research, discussing it, thinking about it and how it revealed their subject – and one day the impulse came to me to write a life of someone. I made a long list of possible subjects and [ Barbara] Stanwyck was on the list.
Why should I be limited by my own biography?
Live your life as if you are writing your Biography.
I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.
According to Kim Jong-Il’s biography, they say he has been constantly accused of dishonesty, drunkenness and sexual excess. So if he lived here, he could be in Congress.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
I’m writing my biography. It’s my business. This is what happened in my life, and I’m writing about it.
As an elected official who comes from the African-American community, there are some similarities. You are always trying to reconcile your own personal biography and affiliations with the demands of the broader democracy. And you need to make sure you are representing everybody.
I’ve always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith‘s ‘Just Kids.’ I’m into that time frame in New York, the ’70s and ‘80s. In art school, I read ‘Close to the Knives,’ the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography – Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book.
Almost any biography will have its useful suggestions for making life a success, but none better or more unfailing than the biography of Christ.
If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of fifty years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in touch with nature more than science. … Too few natural areas remain; both by intent and by indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us.
I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.
All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.
Oftentimes, if a writer really gets her hooks into me, I’ll want to read interviews, or listen to an interview, or read a literary biography or a memoir of some kind. And doing so almost always deepens my enjoyment of the author and her work.
Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque.
I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress. It’s like a secret society up there.
