Biographies Quotes - Page 20

• 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.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Patterns, Life Is, Moments

  Theodore Dalrymple (2003). “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass”, p.163, Ivan R. Dee

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• They (animals) are not just living things; they are beings with lives... that makes all the difference in the world...next time you are outside...notice the first bird you see…you are beholding a unique individual with personality traits, an emotional profile, and a library of knowledge built on experience…what you are witnessing is not just biology, but a biography.

  Jonathan Balcombe

  Emotional, Animal, Unique

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• Tyndall, ... I must remain plain Michael Faraday to the last; and let me now tell you, that if accepted the honour which the Royal Society desires to confer upon me, I would not answer for the integrity of my intellect for a single year.

  Michael Faraday

  Integrity, Science, Years

  On being offered the Presidency of the Royal Society, in J. Tyndall 'Faraday as a Discoverer' (1868) 'Illustrations of Character'

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• A lot of the people in history who I really admire lived before the hyperinformation age we're living in. Even if they were governing or solving problems in consequential periods, like the Civil War or the world wars or the Great Depression or the Cold War, they had a period of time and space to actually think, to be private and you read their biographies, and they had time to think about what was happening and how to respond. I don't think human nature has changed in the last 50-150 years, but the stresses, the demands on those of us in public life have just exploded.

  Hillary Clinton

  Stress, War, Thinking

  Interview With Glenn Thrush, www.politico.com. April 6, 2016.

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• It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

  Margaret Atwood

  Lying, Book, Writing

  "Margaret Atwood : Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered At Hay On Wye, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• I was a voracious reader and the library fed my curiosity, imagination and my soul. I read by the shelf - biographies, fantasy - all and everything fed my dreams. Then as an adult whenever I would go on location the first thing we would do as a family is sign up at the closest library. Not only would we find books, but what was happening in that town, because the library is the head of the community.

  Susan Sarandon

  Dream, Book, Imagination

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• I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?

  Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Cancer, Writing, Character

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

  Hilaire Belloc

  Admirable, Autobiography, Omelets

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• No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Art, Character, Men

  Thomas Carlyle (1839). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays”, p.2

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• To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

  Simone Weil

  Stress, Writing, Ends

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• 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.

  Michael Eisner

  Successful, People, Firsts

  "Michael Eisner: What I've Learned" by cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. March 18, 2009.

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• All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

  Norman Spinrad

  Lying, Writing, Would Be

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• There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Writing, Class, Two

  Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S. Cramer (2007). “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”, p.27, Yale University Press

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• There is no history; only biography.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1969). “The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838-1842”, p.202, Harvard University Press

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• Becoming Richard Pryor is a compulsively readable book that sets a new gold standard for American biography. Scott Scaul's research is extraordinary; his writing is taut, elegant, and insightful; and he captures both the hilarity and pain that made Richard Pryor such a towering figure.

  Debby Applegate

  Pain, Book, Writing

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• My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

  Reza Aslan

  Jesus, Doe, Use

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• I don't write [screenplay character] biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.

  John Sayles

  Writing, Character, Knowing

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• At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

  Robert Adams

  Perfect, Interesting, Honor

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

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• I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

  Anne Lamott

  Grateful, Culture, Littles

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• Your biography becomes your biology.

  Caroline Myss

  Biology

  Twitter post from Nov 04, 2014

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• Your biography is not your destiny, your decisions are.

  Tony Robbins

  Destiny, Decision, Your Destiny

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• The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.

  Tom Shippey

  Loyalty, Echoes, Filters

  Tom Shippey (2014). “The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition”, p.304, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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.

  Horace Mann

  Excellence, Records, Study

  Horace Mann (1867). “Thoughts”, p.105

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• The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Fashion, Teenage, Book

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• Man follows only phantoms.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Math, Science, Men

  "Budget of Paradoxes". Book by Augustus De Morgan, 1866.

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