Quotes About Biography

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

We went to a Barnes and Noble, where I picked up an unauthorized biography of M.C. Hammer, and not wanting to overload her on her first book, I steered Dumb Dumb toward a Choose Your Own Adventure.

I basically read every book ever written about Marilyn Monroe.

There was a movie I was trying to make right after 'Monster,' a bigger behemoth: the Chuck Yeager story. It was a life dream, but it just didn't line up. We just had issues with the life rights, ultimately.

I belong to the Boston Biographers Group - and get my monthly 'fix' from them. Where else can I sit down for two hours with people who understand the challenge I face, daily, as a life-chronicler?

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

told of Henry's reputed sexual endowments, Burton

Mom brought me some peanut butter cookies and a biography of Judy Garland. She told me she thought my problem was that I was too impatient, my fuse was too short, that I was only interested in instant gratification. I said, "Instant gratification takes too long." The glib martyr.

Christianity was neither original nor unique, but that the roots of much of the Judeo/ Christian tradition lay in the prevailing Kamite (ancient Egyptian) culture of the region. We are faced with the inescapable realisation that if Jesus had been able to read the documents of old Egypt, he would have been amazed to find his own biography already substantially written some four or five thousand years previously.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

Geography is about maps, But biography is about chaps.

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

When you're playing someone who really lived, you carry a burden, a burden to be accurate. But it's one that you have to let go of ultimately.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

I knew for certain that being accorded a biography isn't dependent on one's species or one's fame.

Biden's first failed run for the presidency was ended by his dishonesty over his academic record and his plagiarism, including the biography and speeches of British Labor politician Neil Kinnock.

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.

I can't even get people to spell my name right in my own biography!

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

I've heard people have written books of me. People don't even know me, but they've written a book on me. You ever heard of hearing it from the horse's mouth? I'm the horse.

I researched and wrote 'Muhammad Ali: His Life And Times' for two years.

When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography - Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book.