Top 70 Biographies Quotes

No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution – and himself – so it’s unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic – e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

Kirsten Gillibrand and I are very similar in our biographies. We’re both mothers, we’re both lawyers. But we couldn’t be more different in our beliefs, in our principles, in our politics.

At the Sex Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, they were a phenomenal help, too. We went out there for a few days, and they gave us access to materials. And the biographies, there are four or five, ranging from very poor to excellent.

I’ve always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.

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.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Serious biographies need to have a historical base in facts.

Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.

Biographies of me have usually been compiled from old newspaper clips, untruthful publicity stories, and reminiscences of people who claim to have known me well.

I like reading biographies because most of them are slightly similar, and it’s voyeuristic, looking into someone’s life.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

I read everything that Tolkien wrote, and also read biographies of him. I was fascinated by his experiences in World War I, which includes the loss of life of some of his very, very close friends. I think he writes about that a lot in ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

The biographies of the great rarely report much about the nanny, but for many, she will have played a crucial role in their formative years.

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone’s life.

Stripped of its plot, the ‘Iliad’ is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.

I’m a huge fan, and I didn’t grow up with it, I didn’t grow up reading ‘X-Men’ comics. I became a huge fan; I had somebody in my company who gave me the biographies of all the characters. I read Logan’s first and was like, ‘What a great, tragic character.’ I just loved him.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

My parents did give me a lot of books – biographies of Marie Curie – and I did read them, because I was interested.

In my downtime, you’ll mostly find me curled up with a book. I love reading biographies. My favourites are those of Dalai Lama, Osama Bin Laden, and Einstein.

In terms of preparation, if there’s some historical context that’s needed, I do like to read a lot. Working on Joe Kennedy for ‘Boardwalk,’ I read a couple of biographies on him. It’s nice to have a broader context of the man outside of where the show is coming from.

The Gospels were written to present the life and teachings of Jesus in ways that would be appropriate to different readerships, and for that reason are not all the same. They were not intended to be biographies of Jesus, but selective accounts that would demonstrate his significance for different cultures.

I’ve always been a person that thinks nonfiction is more interesting than fiction, I love to read presidential biographies.

I love biographies. I’m especially into stuff about Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s. I find it fascinating and terrifying.

Six-hundred-page biographies of German theologians aren’t known to fly off the shelves.

For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

When I was a boy, I began writing a biography of Shakespeare, and since then I’ve written a number of biographies of actors and famous people.

I read a lot of biographies, and so much is just so boring or so, like, ‘Why did you say that?’

Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all.

Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

I do read on holiday, but it tends to be very lowbrow. I’m into really camp biographies, and I’m a shameless fan of Jilly Cooper.

I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people’s lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved ‘Angela’s Ashes.’ I loved ‘Glass Castle’ so much.

I have a large collection of biographies about jazz musicians.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I’m also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

There’s the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people’s lives, things that had really happened.

I am a huge fan of biographies. What I’m always looking for is a story. I want a story I have never heard from anyone else.

I believe, from reading biographies, that the great musicians have also been great cooks: Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach. I think I’ve worked out why this is – unsociable hours, plus general creativity.

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

I love reading. I’m very much into history, novels, biographies and I have a wide range of thrillers.

While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area.

I love biographies. I read Patti Smith’s ‘Just Kids.’ I’m into that time frame in New York, the ’70s and ’80s. In art school, I read ‘Close to the Knives,’ the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

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

I’m not fond of biographies. I don’t like writing about myself.

I’m interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.

When I’m writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I’m watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don’t immerse myself in whatever’s going on in whatever area I’m working in.

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical – their data are in the way they sound. A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.

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.

True crime has long been a passion for me, but I’m also a sucker for biographies, particularly of politicians, writers, or Hollywood icons.

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I’ve had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.

My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.

My reading is always about musical biographies. I have an innate interest and passion for that.

People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don’t buy studies of presidencies.

My gift, if that’s not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them.