Biographies Quotes - Page 7

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.

[Referring to Fourier's mathematical theory of the conduction of heat] ... Fourier's great mathematical poem.

biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.

I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress. It's like a secret society up there.

I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.

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

I am a total sucker for an actor's autobiography/biography. I have probably read most of them.

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

The biography I've written about Wendy Wasserstein will almost invariably be different than the one anyone else would write.

Unfortunately, I'm not a history buff. I don't read biographies, except of some of those writers whom I've collected over the years - particularly Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller, people like Charles Bukowski and John Fante and David Foster Wallace.

John looked ruddy and plump, with a pair of cheeks like a trumpeter.

Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.

According to Kim Jong-Il's biography, they say he has been constantly accused of dishonesty, drunkenness and sexual excess. So if he lived here, he could be in Congress.

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.

According to Nietzche," said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, "philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.

Behind each biography there should always be a rich treasury of unformulated knowledge, a tapestry that has not been unrolled.

I was kind of relieved with the way the book [The Proud Highway] came out. It's beyond an autobiography or a biography. I never knew what was going to come up next.

I feel I have to live a little longer before I write a sequel to my auto biography which covers my experiences up until October 1991.

I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.

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.

[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you.

Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?

The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.