Quotes About Biography

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

The problem is that, slowly but surely across the past two hundred years of scholarly research, we have learned that the gospels are exactly what they openly and honestly claim they are. They are not history, though they contain history. They are not biography, though they contain biography. They are gospel—that is, good news. Good indicates that the news is seen from somebody's point of view—from, for example, the Christian rather than the imperial interpretation.

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

[Lyndon Baines ] Johnson is a big and larger-than-life guy, we just tried to give him the dynamic range that he actually had.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'

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.

…my life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me . . ." "I've never much cared for horror stories.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.

I think the Queen enjoyed my book on her father, George VI.

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

I was fascinated by the story of FW Murnau, one of the most famous directors in Germany, where I come from.

I read a lot of science fiction and biography - these are my two favorite genres. My favorite science fiction writers are Hertling, Suarez, Gibson and Stephenson, but I enjoy many others. I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.

My parents did give me a lot of books - biographies of Marie Curie - and I did read them, because I was interested.

I was reading William Shawcross's biography of the Queen Mother, dressed in my witch outfit! And you know what? It was a really good mix; it was a therapeutic mix.

Ultimately, Cole Porter's music might say more about his life than any biography could. His songs, with their witty lyrics and debonair style, are an advertisement for his personality and his public persona.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

Thomas More rarely discussed his siblings, and two of them are never mentioned by him. It is likely that they were part of that infant mortality which had provoked such concern for early baptism.

I first wrote a biography of Thomas Carlyle, and it turned out I loved writing biographies and had a talent for it. I believed I had a contribution to make.

I never met Barbara Cartland. But now that I'm working on her life, I wish I had. I think there was a lot of pathos in it and I'm intrigued by her.