I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the richness of resources available for creating biographies.
Walter Isaacson reflects on his experience as a biographer, highlighting that he has always found an extensive amount of material to draw from when researching the lives of notable individuals. This suggests that great stories and insights can be discovered when examining the lives and contributions of extraordinary people, and it underscores the importance of thorough research in the field of biography.
In practice
In a lecture about the importance of storytelling, one might quote Isaacson to highlight how rich biographies can inform personal narratives.
I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant
Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.
for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.
What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.
When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.
The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.
It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
I was really aware, even while it was happening, that the discovery of arts education in my life sort of saved my life.
But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
In a television interview, I said that diversity in our children's books should include the adventures of disabled children, travellers and gipsies, LGBT teens, different cultures, classes, colours, religions. It shouldn't be a token gesture, nor do such stories need to be 'issue-based'.
If you can read in the 21st century you own the world.
I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
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