Famous Quotes & Sayings

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening.

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.

Joseph Campbell

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or place. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd.

Will Rogers

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.

A. S. Byatt

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

Denis O'Hare

I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.

My first biography was 'Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.' To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.

Dan Wakefield

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

Brad Grey

Mental illnesses involve biological brain disorders, no matter what Tom Cruise says,

Karen Abbott

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

Jamie Cullum

I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'

For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.

Antonia Fraser

King Juan Carlos would be worthy of a full biography as a major player in his country's history. Alas, my Spanish is not good enough to offer myself!

He was one of the first to treat these people as serious American writers, ... Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac.

He has a biography that makes clear that he grew away from the (leftist) scene, and he's done great work for our country.

Robert Gottlieb

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

George Vecsey

When I was working on the unauthorized biography 'Stan Musial: An American Life,' which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

Tad Devine

When candidates introduce themselves through biography, it invites voters in in a unique way, a way of relating to people in their own lives and experiences.

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

Thomas Mallon

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

Brent Spiner

The Lindbergh biography is fantastic. I just read it. And I loved it.

Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.

The way we should take life is to ensure that if a biography is ever written about us, that it is a bloody good read.

Tina Brown

The most frequent thing people said to me about Princess Diana when I was conducting interviews for my biography was that she could create a circle of intimacy in the middle of a crowd.

They don't pile up too much oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrate or phosphate. Those are kept under some kind of biological control. That's how the past has been. The big issue is, will the future work that way?

It wasn't until (Dew) wrote the biography that we really found out a lot about what he had been doing. We just never felt that what he was doing was particularly difficult or meaningful. We were just normal.

Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

Mark Twain

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written

Tad Devine

The support for Gore comes much more quickly and much more easily once voters get a sense of who he is. Until they understand something about his motivation and his biography and his background, it is difficult for voters to get a handle on him outside of the image of a vice president.

Elvis Costello

The songs will tell a story that I have imagined existing between the lines of Andersen's biography and some of his most famous tales, ... They speak of a misfit's love for an unattainable woman and a struggle between a huckster and someone who composes music in secret.

We might have had our biological families, but this was our extended family. Everyone was a brother or a sister. She was our mother.

We expected 'Living History' to be the best-selling biography of the summer and think the momentum will continue through the fall.

Laura Joplin

The biography was a personal quest to understand Janis and to sort what was real from stories that were embellished,