Quotes About Biographies

Biographies by preachers are of no value. If they admire a man they always make him a saint, while if they dislike one, they always make him a demon.

Don't just make your life a documentary of compromised relationships rather live notorious, fearless and scandalous life to be part of others biographies.

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.

Read no less than ½ hour a day or listen to audiobooks while in the car or cleaning the house. Biographies of great people taught me, as I said, that even eminent people fail but keep getting up.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.

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.

I believe, from reading biographies, that the great musicians have also been great cooks: Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach. I think I've worked out why this is - unsociable hours, plus general creativity.

I have a large collection of biographies about jazz musicians.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

Of course, after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and we're left with 'how was your day?' and 'when will you be home?' and 'have you put the bins out?' Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

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.)

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.'

I never conceived of my biographies as merely telling the lives of famous men but rather as a means of illuminating their times and the great forces that shaped their times—particularly political power, since in a democracy political power has so great a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of that democracy.

People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start, I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.

Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all.

In terms of preparation, if there's some historical context that's needed, I do like to read a lot. Working on Joe Kennedy for 'Boardwalk,' I read a couple of biographies on him. It's nice to have a broader context of the man outside of where the show is coming from.

I've always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.

I've always been a person that thinks nonfiction is more interesting than fiction, I love to read presidential biographies.

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.

Tho was Buffalo Bill Cody? Most people know, at the very least, that he was a hero of the Old West, like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson-one of those larger-than-life figures from which legends are made. Cody himself provided such a linkage to his heroic predecessors in 1888 when he published a book with biographies of Boone,

and biographies of him have appeared at irregular intervals ever since. A search of "Buffalo Bill Cody

And finally, we can include the rapidly expanding library of biographies now available, revealing human nature in depth and in action.