Biographies Quotes - Page 4

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.

Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

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

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever.

I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.

My lectures were highly esteemed, but my operations less thought of, so that I am of opinion that my operations rather kept down my practice, than increased it.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

I am not aware that I have deserved any notoriey, and I have no taste for its buzz.

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

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.

Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.

The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.

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

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.

I do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject.