Quotes About Biographies

I read a lot about her. I read a lot of bios. I read bios about the royal family; I read this little novella called 'The Uncommon Reader,' which is a fiction: it's about Queen Elizabeth going on this library bus and choosing books and reading them, but it's so sweet.

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.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Lives do not have plots, only biographies do.

unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.

While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area.

Who, then, is Serlingpa?14 All biographies of Ati?a state that whenever he would utter Serlingpa's name, tears would fall down his cheeks. They report that Ati?a exclaimed that whatever degree of good heart he possessed was due entirely to Serlingpa.

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.

Spread, widen, flatten, fade. Like all waves. Like all shocks. A note in the history books. A few biographies. Revisionist biographies a generation later. Encyclopedia entries. Notes at the end of translations of his books. That is the stillness into which all great lives fade.

strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin

Cobb's well-deserved reputation as a bibliophile (he couldn't resist biographies of Napoleon) sometimes resulted in him receiving books instead of trophies or flowers.

literary biographies, the genre didn't come into its own until the eighteenth century, spurred by an intense interest in life writing

I have very positive memories of reading biographies of unusual Americans as a child.

When I'm writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I'm watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don't immerse myself in whatever's going on in whatever area I'm working in.

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

The Googling that might occur before dinner parties, however, confuses me more than the Googling of dead wives, especially since I prefer to have dinner parties where nobody talks about their careers. Isn't that the mark of a failed dinner party? When the conversations resemble job interviews? Wouldn't it actually be preferable, thus, to request that everyone Google the other guests beforehand so our tedious biographies won't need teasing out in person?

The end product of biblical Christianity is a person—not a book, not a building, not a set of principles or a system of ethics—but one person in two natures (divine/human) with four ministries (prophet/priest/king/sage) and four biographies (the Gospels). But those four biographies don't tell the whole story. Every bit of Scripture is part of the same great story of that one person and that one story's plotline of creation, revelation, redemption, and consummation.

But we can't expect every great artist to have a great soul. If more of them were like Verdi, we could read artists' biographies for uplift; but we would be so repelled by Wagner that we would forget to listen, or by Picasso that we would forget to look.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

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

Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!

People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don't buy studies of presidencies.

I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.