Biography Quotes

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

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.

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.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.

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.

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.

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

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

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

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

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

I'm an avid biography reader.

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

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.

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn't tell it like it was.

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