Biographies Quotes - Page 18

• If you read the biography of any great man, you will always notice two things: His mother's contribution in his progress and his teacher's contribution in his growth and development.

  Narendra Modi

  Education, Mother, Teacher

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• Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.

  Darin Strauss

  Book, Cities, Little Sister

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• I'm getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don't give the poor chap a chance...the Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography.

  Ian Fleming

  Sorry, Team, Writing

  "Casino Royale". Book by Ian Fleming, ch. 20: The Nature Of Evil, 1953.

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• May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.

  James M. Barrie

  Writing, May, Blast

  "Hide-and-seek with Angels: The Life of J.M. Barrie". Book by Lisa Chaney, www.theguardian.com. 2005.

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• Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Men, Long, Lasts

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• Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography.

  Cornel West

  Powerful, Book, Class

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• Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation-the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west.

  David Levering Lewis

  Order, People, Black

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• I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

  A. Scott Berg

  Thinking, Interesting, Life And Time

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

  Nancy Horan

  Reading, Use, Source

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• The rumors of Frank Sinatras violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.

  Kitty Kelley

  Writing, Sleep, Ties

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• Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

  Arthur Golden

  Writing, Simple, Men

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• Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Believe, Thinking, People

  "Choosing When To Go". www.lankaweb.com. December 12, 2016.

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• Most of society thinks that biography is destiny, that the past equals the future, and of course it does if you live there...but what we really have to remind ourselves is that decision is the ultimate power.

  Tony Robbins

  Inspirational, Past, Destiny

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• I push back against a deeply-entrenched tendency in American culture to label quickly and no longer even examine the labels that were initially stamped on a person. I don't have a problem with any of my "hyphenated" biography - I don't have any problem with that at all. The world would be a better place if our thread of hyphenation were truly embraced beyond mere naming and category.

  Fady Joudah

  Would Be, Culture, Labels

  Source: therumpus.net

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• On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.

  Kate Zambreno

  Whole

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at thesame time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch's biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!

  Franz Grillparzer

  Reading, Hero, Heart

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• I haven't had a chance to pick up a good book in a long time, because I've been either reading scripts or learning them or writing them. And so, by the time the day is done, I usually just want to click on The Bachelor and fall asleep. But I gravitate toward biographies and things like that.

  Justin Theroux

  Fall, Reading, Book

  Source: www.elle.com

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• I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Ideas, Appreciate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• All of Robert Caro's biographies are exceptional, in part because of Caro's fundamental ambivalence about power. He sees its necessity and use for getting things done, even as he is often repelled by watching power at close range. His masterpiece on Robert Moses, The Power Broker, describes the evolution of Moses from idealist to pragmatist as he became one of the most powerful figures in the 20th century.

  Jeffrey Pfeffer

  Powerful, Use, Fundamentals

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• It's great fun to memorize somebody's biography, and then liberally play with the real facts of their life and go a step beyond reality.

  Andy Daly

  Fun, Real, Play

  "A Real Person Who Has Real Thoughts and Feelings". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. February 29, 2016.

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• Computer chips will cost about a penny. That's the cost of scrap paper. The Internet will be basically for free and it will be inside our contact lens. When we blink, we will go online. When we see somebody that we don't recognize, our contact lens will identify who they are, print out their biography in your contact lens and translate, if they're speaking Chinese, into English with subtitles as they speak.

  Michio Kaku

  Chinese, Lenses, Cost

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I'd put the most money on Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson - and not just because we'll probably still be waiting for the final volume in 2017.

  David Edelstein

  Waiting, Finals, Volume

  Source: www.vulture.com

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• [Freud's] great strength, though sometimes also his weakness, was the quite extraordinary respect he had for the singular fact... When he got hold of a simple but significant fact he would feel, and know, that it was an example of something general or universal, and the idea of collecting statistics on the matter was quite alien to him.

  Ernest Jones

  Science, Simple, Ideas

  Ernest Jones (1961). “The life and work of Sigmund Freud”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Creativity, Men, Illustration

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1396, Delphi Classics

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• Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.

  Edmund White

  Hate, Gay, Men

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