Biography Quotes

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Mark Twain

Cannot, Himself, Written

Biography lends to death a new terror.
Oscar Wilde

Death, Terror, Lends

If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don't know what was going on in the person's mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.
Clint Eastwood

Mind, Reality, Person

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle

Great, Men, History

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
Benjamin Disraeli

Life, History, Nothing

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
Carter G. Woodson

History, Lose, Teaching

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
John Kenneth Galbraith

Why, Fiction, Escapist

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

Time, History, May

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Robert Hall

History, Attention, Individual

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
Arthur Balfour

Enemy, Written, Acute

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.
Thomas Szasz

I was reading William Shawcross's biography of the Queen Mother, dressed in my witch outfit! And you know what? It was a really good mix; it was a therapeutic mix.
Helena Bonham Carter

Good, Mother, Reading

This is the best biography by me I have ever read.
Lawrence Welk

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

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul

Great, History, Art

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
John Updike

Through, Two, Few

I had lost faith in biography.
A. N. Wilson

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life, Human, System

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
Anita Brookner

Women, Men, Simple

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
Rebecca West

Love, Truth, Real

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.
William Ellery Channing

Good, Worth, Anecdote

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.
Anthony Trollope

Morning, May, After

I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography.
Kathy Griffin

Special, Comedy, Central

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'
Joyce Carol Oates

High, Memories, Fiction

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.
Robert Caro

Power, Political, Guy

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.
Jane Campion

Love, Read, Story

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.
Jane Campion

Deep, Between, Reading

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.
Todd Gitlin

History, Subject, Proper

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
Carlos Fuentes

Death, Words, Put

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
John Irving

Place, Personal, Novels

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