Top 212 Biographies Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I greatly enjoy reading the biographies of scientists, and when doing so I always hope to learn the secrets of their success. Alas, those secrets generally remain elusive.

My parents did give me a lot of books - biographies of Marie Curie - and I did read them, because I was interested.

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

I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

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.

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

Biographies of me have usually been compiled from old newspaper clips, untruthful publicity stories, and reminiscences of people who claim to have known me well.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.

In a fit at the bookstore one day, I bought all my favourite composers' biographies: Schubert, Massenet, Wolf. I've still not had a chance to read them; it breaks my heart. But when you travel so much, you just can't take that many books with you.

I will read biographies or autobiographies while I'm writing, but mostly I put books in a to-read queue, like Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Outline."

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

There were, like, 20 of [Jackie Kennedy's biographies], which was interesting because they are not exactly high literature - they are pulpy.But the [Arthur] Schlesinger transcripts ended up being the most useful of anything.

I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

I don't write [screenplay character] biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.

Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

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.

Unusual financial activity: none, unless you count the fact that someone in the family is way too into Civil War biographies. (Can this be a possible indication of Confederate insurgents still living and working in Virginia? Must research further.)

The biographies are very enlightening because you realise, "Oh my God, all these people I’ve admired - and tried to emulate even - when I was younger died tragically from substance abuse.

I first wrote a biography of Thomas Carlyle, and it turned out I loved writing biographies and had a talent for it. I believed I had a contribution to make.

I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.

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

Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

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.

I am a huge fan of biographies. What I'm always looking for is a story. I want a story I have never heard from anyone else.

I've had three biographies made about my life so people know an awful lot about me.

Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the scientific geniuses who formerly owned them? I'll never look at a pigeon, a pearl, or a Wheatstone bridge the same way again.

As an eight-year-old, I would listen to stories and biographies of Charles Darwin and Galileo. I also went to wonderful schools and had great teachers who inspired me.

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

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.

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.

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

There's so much information out there. There are written biographies of Gavaskar and Kapil Dev, there are interviews, and we have had the benefit of meeting these players. There's a physical and psychological aspect, and combining these two is what will help '83' connect with the millenials and cricket lovers.

If you read any sort of, like, military general autobiographies or biographies, most of them never wanted to fight, you know? It's necessary. War is necessary.

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

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

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.

The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

I don't plan on writing biographies of great sports stars who are still playing ball. But I did write one on Jackie Robinson, who was playing ball in the 20th century.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.

The reason I moved to Nashville was because I was reading biographies of a lot of my country music heroes, and I thought it would be better to actually go where the history was, as opposed to just reading about it.

My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.

I do read a lot of autobiographies and biographies but from people who are not in my field - older women, older artists, Miles Davis.

My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug 'Vanity Fair.' You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.

If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they're often told from a political perspective.

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.

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

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

The biographies of the great rarely report much about the nanny, but for many, she will have played a crucial role in their formative years.

When I was growing up, I read Britney Spears' and Mariah Carey's biographies. I just wanted to see how they did it because I was so eager to get into the biz.

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

In my downtime, you'll mostly find me curled up with a book. I love reading biographies. My favourites are those of Dalai Lama, Osama Bin Laden, and Einstein.

I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.