Biographical Accounts Quotes

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

I have very positive memories of reading biographies of unusual Americans as a child.

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.

Some of the most learned of the people were chosen to make known the lives of those lords in songs.

Historyis nothing other than a collection of the lives of people, some of them great, some of them ordinarynothing other than a collection of what people have done in challenging circumstances and how they have risen to those circumstances.

I enjoy reading biographies because I want to know about the people who messed up the world.

Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they're often told from a political perspective.

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

Maybe the 'Million Little Pieces' of the world are so popular because no one ever writes memoirs about PTA chairwomen; what memoirists do, and often get in trouble for, is bring interesting lives to light.

Some of the biographies [of princess Margaret] were really sensationalist, News of the World sorts, but they were great because they also gave first and secondhand accounts of her at home. The butlers come forward and give little moments, some of which you discard and some which ring somehow true and you use.

I can't stand these autobiographies that start with, you know, 'I was born in Acton, and I went to such and such a school.' They just bore me.

Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.

The primary goal of the so-called nonfiction text is to relay the facts of an event - the facts about a person, the facts of history - which is not why I turned to this genre.

The literary data that we have historically is indeed mostly about leaders or important people.

The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki.

With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.

For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.

The parallel circumstances and kindred images to which we readily conform our minds are, above all other writings, to be found in the lives of particular persons, and therefore no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography.

I like to read. Autobiographies.

I've been writing big stories of history, but there are a lot of fascinating little stories.