Top 479 Biography Quotes & Sayings

A photograph is a biography of a moment.

Digging up new information and speculating on it isn't your primary purpose when you're writing a biography intended for young readers, unless you ?nd compelling evidence that departs from the accepted wisdom. A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record.

The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesnt discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.

The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

All history is biography.

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.

I'd like to write a biography of Ivan the Terrible.

I had lost faith in biography.

I had a checklist in my mind of the things that make a biography practical. Is the source material centralized? Is it easy to find? Are there new primary sources that no one has ever had access to? Are all the sources in English? If they're not, are they in a language that you speak? And I realized that not only is Armstrong the most important figure of Jazz in the 20th Century, but he's a perfect subject for a biography for all of these reasons. I had always loved his music and I had been fascinated in him as a personality. And that's really the key to writing a biography.

There is properly no history, only biography.

Why should I be limited by my own biography?

This is the best biography by me I have ever read.

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

Biography is the best form of history.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

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.

I'm an avid biography reader.

All of our theology must eventually become biography.

A new biography of Madonna came out last week, and apparently the biography lists all the men she's slept with. The book is apparently called the Manhattan Telephone Directory.

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

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.

The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.

There is no history; only biography.

I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.

A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.

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."

Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.

I believe no matter how much you research a person's life. No matter how long you spend, the person always remains a mystery. I go by this quote that Mark Twain said about the definition of a biography: a biography is the clothes and buttons of a man or a woman but the real story is in the person's head and that you can never know. I don't think it's possible to get the whole picture, ever.

History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons

Biography is the only true history.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.

John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.

The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.

Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.

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.

This is a glorious biography ... The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on this scale ... Lee the biographer pursues her subject down every winding corridor, into every hidden passage and dark corner ... Her critical exploration of Edith Whartons work is dazzlingly assured ... A feat of exhaustive research, and finely tuned to Whartons creative achievement at the same time ... [Wharton] could scarcely have failed to be impressed by ... its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

Our theology must become biography.

I view my records as a personal biography.

All Philosophy is Biography

Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

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

Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body - you thoughts, your actions, your food - the thing you feed your life.

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.