Quotes About Biography

I am told that our chroniclers' practice of inventing speeches for great persons whose lives they write is unscholarly.

El virtuosismo de los ingleses en el género biográfico es sin duda una consecuencia de la antigüedad de sus instituciones democráticas y del culto al individuo que de ello se deriva.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

The moment seemed right to me for a full and, if possible, authoritative portrait of the life and character of the Prince of Wales.

I hope that people will be inspired by Madam Walker's story. I hope that they will see her as a complex human being, and that they will want to dig more deeply, that they will want to know the details of her life.

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 see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

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

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

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

I think I've had 16 books that purport to be a biography of me. I've never cooperated with someone.

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

I was excited when I first got the call, when I heard BBC Four were making a biography and they were interested in me being a part of it.

Once you choose to run for president of the United States and succeed, your earlier life, your biography, is a major part of American history.

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

One day I'll bring a biography of my life out and that will be the biggest joke I'll ever tell.

I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.

More and more I'm finding that I'm reading history, I'm reading biography, I'm reading autobiography for a sense of people who've been able to provide leadership. I don't read leadership books anymore.

IMDB's not the most accurate. Even my birth place and my age are wrong there.

My first biography was 'Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.' To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.

When I sit down with my team before an engagement, sometimes they are horrified as I say I don't want to read the biographical brief because I prefer to prise information out of people. It becomes like a game. The stories that come out, I could write a book about.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.