Quotes About Biography

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.

I probably learned more about Marion Barry listening to Chris Rock than I did reading a headline.

Mary Lincoln's mental health had never been good, and the loss of young Willie ended her life as a functional wife and mother. In "A Mother's Trial: Mary Lincoln and the Civil War," by Jayne Coster.

Me in a cape? I don't fancy that. Tight tights? Nah! I don't think that's right for me. I just respond more to true stories; that's my flavour.

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

You do not give a great biographer a timetable. You let them do their work and, in due course, publish it.

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him.

This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography.

After a friend dies young, the story of her life becomes the exposition to a tragedy. This is the central problem of biography.

I've read quite a bit! "History and biography, mostly what Chains prescribed for you." "What could possibly be wrong with those subjects?" "As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living in the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them.

I'm reading Joe Eszterhas biography; it's fabulous. Every time he made a movie, he fought with the director or the producer over the ending.

Well, my paper has asked me to do a series: Lives of the Great Musicians, reading time 2 minutes.

It took me five years on Lyndon Johnson, ten years on the Kennedys, six years on the Roosevelts. Inevitably, you get shaped by the people that you're thinking about during that period of time.

But now a thought occurs to me. My own history would really seem so tame contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave it unwritten until I am hanged. If some other biographies I have read had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred, it would have been a felicitous thing, for the reading public. How does it strike you? AWFUL

I am lost without my Boswell.

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.

Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was. He claimed to be writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit candidate for biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself.

Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.

Stacy Schiff

Moving lockstep through a series of predictable transitions is no longer a route to personal security. Each man and woman must put together a highly individualized sequence of transitions in and out of school, work, and marriage in order to take advantage of shifting opportunities and respond to unexpected setbacks--a do-it-yourself biolography.

Seis o siete escenas para cada biografía, pues la vida ?lo siento? no da para mucho más.

Luther always maintained that he was probably born in 1484, but neither Luther nor even his own mother could be sure, and current reckoning puts it more likely at either 1482 or 1483, with the preponderance of evidence favoring the latter, so that in the course of this book we shall use that year.

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born. My brother and I were born in London...but our descent, our interest and our joy were in the north country'. Quoted in The Tale of Beatrix Potter a Biography by Margaret Lane, First Edition p 32-33