Quotes About Biography

All history is biography.

There is properly no history; only biography.

spent much of the next two years cowriting and editing her biography.  Emerson was a signatory of the "Declaration of Sentiments" of the first Women's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. And in 1855, he attended and addressed the convention in Boston.

Yet, as a sympathetic biographer, shall I suggest, this outspoken young woman is not so innocent as she imagines herself?

Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci, which both humanizes the man and offers insight into his genius (do read

In the 1890s the reform journalist E. L. Godkin alleged that Tammany leaders feared biography more than the penitentiary.

For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a leader perhaps as indispensable in his way as was Lincoln to the social and political direction of the country. After living with the subject

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.

I believed in the worth of biography and even of ethnography, but I believed more powerfully in the reach of a well-told narrative that set out to pull the reader into the life of that child I had not been. I did not want to relate what had happened to me.

There's no such thing as merit separated from biography, he had told me. The only question is whether you're going to let your biography hold you down or help you up.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

In Peter Ackroyd's book 'London: The Biography,' he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.

I don't think my writing has much to do with my age. For me, my biography is more about what I was reading at what age. It's more of an intellectual thing of wanting to be free to write and think without being too bound by categorisation. I don't think I'm made for these times; I feel more like an old-fashioned writer.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

I can't say I wasn't warned. Alarms started clanging the day I signed to write 'His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra' (Bantam Books, 1986).

More than anything, I want to keep working with people of talent like Craig Gillespie, Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood. But there's also those long-dreamt-of moments: I'd love to host 'Saturday Night Live,' I'd love to do a Penguin stand-alone movie at Warner Bros., I'd love to do a Teddy Roosevelt biopic.

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography.

Sir Jadunath Sarkar

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.

If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you're offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.