A Quote by Charles Wheelan

Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

Charles Wheelan

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Biographies Interesting Just Lead Like Linear Lives Obituaries Only Orderly People Rarely Read Remind Successful Successful People Us

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Charles Wheelan
American - Author
Born: 1966

I’m not a sociopath or a freak (although I don’t suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don’t enjoy being with people. People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don’t have very interesting lives. So I get impatient. For some reason I think you should only say something if it’s interesting or absolutely has to be said.

Peter Cameron

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.

Michael Eisner

I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.

Natasha Trethewey

I hear what many of you are saying: We don’t have the time, we are busy. Well Nobody Has Time, Everyone Is Busy. In the time it took you to read this post, your life just got a minute shorter. That is precisely why we read (and why some of us write): because life is short and finite, we want more, and literature is the distillation of all those lives we will not lead.

Jessica Zafra

My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.

Bill Paxton

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.

Al Sharpton

I read a lot by female psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who wrote prominent biographies of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud because she studied with all of them. She had this unbelievable insight into contemporary psychoanalysis. What is so interesting is that she wrote her life, and she knew that her life would be about these men, and it didn't stop her from leading an incredibly successful academic career. But her strange self-awareness that she was going to bookmark these men's lives is really interesting to me.

Laura Marling

I scrolled on down to the obituaries. I usually read the obituaries first as there is always the happy chance that one of them will make my day.

Robert A. Heinlein

My sister's a musician. Everyone else in our family, it's either academics or artists of one kind or another. And those are the people that I think I like to hang out with, too. I think, you know, they're always interesting; they lead interesting lives, and I think they're important for everyone to read about because everyone is an artist in a way.

Rebecca Makkai

Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

Lee Kuan Yew

Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us.

Diana Trilling

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

Joan Didion

My Dad doesn't see limitations; he either sees hard workers or people who are lazy. As a result, despite any disability or obstacle, my siblings and I all lead relatively happy and successful lives. I believe a good deal of this is due to the fact that excuses were rarely tolerated.

Sarah Cooper

The mistake that people made around 2000 with the emergence of the web was that they thought that people would not read long-form on a screen. Following from that idea, they quit doing long-form on screens. It got shorter and shorter, and then came cats toying with flowers and all of those clichés, but it was wrong. People will read long-form on a device if they want to read long-form.

Terry McDonell

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.

Ronald Frame

I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, 'Twilight,' also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families - real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.

Wynter Gordon

A Quote by Charles Wheelan

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