Martha MacCallum Quotes

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.

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

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

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

In daring to re-tell the stories of the last twelve American presidents, both public and private, I knew I would incur some outrage with 'American Caesars.'

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.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'

I'm an avid biography reader.

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

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 didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

Other than fiction and poetry I tend to read history.

There were, like, 20 of [Jackie Kennedy's biographies], which was interesting because they are not exactly high literature - they are pulpy.But the [Arthur] Schlesinger transcripts ended up being the most useful of anything.

I'm all about nonfiction. I rarely read fiction. I like to read about things that really happened, facts, real life situations. That's what inspires me.

I don't think Trump reads. If he does, my guess is he's reading autobiographies of ... I wonder if he's read Mein Kampf.

I had lost faith in biography.

For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.

Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.

I hardly read fiction; I mostly read nonfiction. I like to examine material things.

Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.