Quotes About Biography

On the Internet, on IMDB, they've got that my middle name as Archibald. I don't have a middle name! My father doesn't like middle names.

I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history.

The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.

Oscar Wilde said: 'Biography lends to death a new terror.' Well, memoir adds that same promise to parenting.

Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement.

Biography shows through, all the mitigating antecedents. People teem with their own information and I start to get the headache of interest in them.

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'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography.

In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called 'Golden Girl,' a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.

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

Life is a rough biography. Memories smooth out the edges.

It is said that when the historian John Wheeler-Bennett came to write the official biography of King George VI, the Queen Mother asked him to tone down the many references to her influence on her husband.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Johnsons are rare; yet, Boswells are perhaps still rarer.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

The history of the world is but a biography of great men.

History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.

My mother was a biographer's dream and a nightmare. She was a dream because she was a classic to write about and everybody loves her. She was a nightmare because there are no scandals, quasi-cruelties, no really juicy stuff.

Nine books have been written about me, and there's not a word of truth in any of them.

Nigel Hamilton

We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents...Sometimes the 'unfinisheds' are among the most beautiful symphonies.

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

Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]