Biographies Quotes

• I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

  Richard Attenborough

  Destiny, Views, People

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Henry David Thoreau

  Book, Knowledge, Honest

  Henry David Thoreau (1999). “Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Biography is the only true history.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Life, My Biography

  8 Copy quote

• I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much.

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  Believe, Writing, Hands

  10 Copy quote

• People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

  Anthony Powell

  Thinking, People, Cases

  Anthony Powell (2010). “Hearing Secret Harmonies: Book 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time”, p.84, University of Chicago Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Antonia Fraser

  Long, Historical, Gaps

  7 Copy quote

• The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesnt discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.

  Leon Edel

  Gossip, Achievement, Secret

  7 Copy quote

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

  George Steiner

  Majority, Oblivion, Gray

  George Steiner (1974). “In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture”, p.87, Yale University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

  Edmund White

  Class, People, Avenging

  Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.

  84 Copy quote

  Show source

• Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

  Pamela Stephenson

  Writing, Objectivity, Perfect

  8 Copy quote

• Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

  John Arbuthnot

  Science, Terror

  Letter to Jonathan Swift, 13 Jan. 1733

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

  Antonia Fraser

  Writing, Heart, Realizing

  6 Copy quote

• I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

  Jonathan Frakes

  Baseball, Writing, Literature

  7 Copy quote

• If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Sweet, Jesus, Gentleman

  7 Copy quote

• All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

  Rebecca West

  Good Life, Fiction, Study

  7 Copy quote

• I hate biographies which say, I was called to such and such an office, and he offered me so and so, and I got so and so money. I find that very tedious. The best biographies are written by other people.

  Leslie Caron

  Hate, Office, People

  7 Copy quote

• I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Years, Personal History, Interest

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.650, Library of America

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life.

  Justin Hayward

  Song, Heart, People

  11 Copy quote

• For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

  Louis L'Amour

  Motivational, Reading, Numbers

  Louis L'Amour (2008). “Education of a Wandering Man”, p.25, Bantam

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  V. S. Naipaul

  Autobiography, Incompleteness

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.189, Pan Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.

  Conrad Veidt

  Use, Actors, Movie Actors

  8 Copy quote

• There is properly no history, only biography.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Funny Life, History, Historical

  Essays "History" (1841)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

  Philip Guedalla

  Easter, Fiction, West

  8 Copy quote

• It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

  George Plimpton

  Editors, Pleasure, Reader

  8 Copy quote

• One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

  William Ellery Channing

  Anecdotes, Volume, Speakers

  7 Copy quote