Quotes About Biography

Read no history--nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Do not read history. Read biography for it is life without theory.

The last book I read to my mom was 'Barbara Bush: A Memoir' published by mom in 1994. It reflected on their entire life - dad going to China, running the CIA, running for Senate, running for President twice.

I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is clear that he did.

In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.

I am deeply honored to be making 'Life Itself,' a documentary on the life of Roger Ebert, and to have had the full cooperation and enthusiasm of Roger and his wife, Chaz.

The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

Dawidoff, Nicholas. The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. New York: Vintage, 1994. de

I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.

I think that I'm busy in the present, and I don't want to go back. Well, there's been an unauthorized biography, and you can't stop them. It didn't worry me.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

I like film books at the bottom of the barrel and art books at the top. 'The Ghastly One,' by Jimmy McDonough, is a hilarious biography of one of the most hideous directors who ever picked up a movie camera - Andy Milligan.

The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.

You may be wondering: Could Ella Fitzgerald explode your liver? She could not.

Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land. Never was this messianic mood more extreme than on the day Barack Obama won the presidency.

The influential 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes to the opposite extreme from the Encyclopédie: social history is buried within biography. So to read about the post-Roman world you must look up the entry on Attila the Hun.

Whenever a scientist they coveted turned out to have a blemish on his record, they rewrote his biography. They systematically expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who had been rated by interrogators as "ardent Nazi" were re-categorized as "not an ardent Nazi.

So I recommend reading literature, such as the inspiring biography of Anwar Sadat, In Search of Identity, and seeing movies like Chariots of Fire or plays like Les Misérables that expose you to models of Win/Win.

And if Henry Higgins is not the most reprehensible character ever written for the stage, that's only because somewhere, somehow, someone is composing a musical biography of Ronald Reagan

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

When you are doing a film about real people, you don't have a lot of manoeuvrability when it comes to how much you can add by way of imagination. You have to replicate what they were like. What you can add to it is your version of it.

Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin's biography written for children.