I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

My parents regarded school teachers as higher beings, as did many immigrants.

As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.

I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

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

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

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

Biography lends to death a new terror.

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.

I'm an avid biography reader.

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

I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.

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.

I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.

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

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.

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.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

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

I'm narrating the television series Biography. I'm still involved in my music - I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I'm writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project.

I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.

What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.

John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.

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.