Quotes About Biography

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

'Colonel Roosevelt' is compelling reading, and Morris a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

John Quincy Adams ranks with Jimmy Carter on the roster of ex-presidential redemption. Instead of completing a biography of his father, he let himself be elected to the House, where he spent nine terms in Whiggish opposition to the Democrats, supporting a national bank and a protective tariff and internal improvements.

I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about.

A biopic teaches you a lot.

In an essay in American Heritage magazine for September 1999, John Steele Gordon writes of biography as

biography much easier. On a personal note, I should like to thank Stanley R. Moore, Dr. Michael Rostafinski, and John Tebbel for advice and information; my wife and "first reader," Reade Johnson; and my editor at John Wiley, Hana Lane, for

cynical. As his latest biographer, I believe his life has a valuable contribution to make in this new millennium-it provides a sense of who we once were and who we might be again. He was a commanding presence in our American history, a man who helped shape the way we look at that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild West, in all its adventure, violence, and romance.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect - a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

Robert M. Gates

unstable control freak, according to Jack Miles, God's unflappable biographer (God: A Biography).

Political science without biography is a form of taxidermy.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

The earliest biography of Cranmer, probably conceived within a few hours of his death, began the villain narrative: Bishop Cranmer's Recantacyons by Cardinal Pole's Archdeacon of Canterbury and diocesan official Nicholas Harpsfield. 1 Written in Latin for an international audience, it effectively invents a new genre, anti-martyrology:

The Liberals were in a minority, but were strongly backed by the Irish Nationalists, even though they were themselves divided between pro- and anti-Parnellite factions. Gladstone's last government included three subsequent Liberal prime ministers – Rosebery, Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H.H. Asquith, but his closest associate was John Morley, the Irish Chief Secretary, who was later to write his biography in three extensive volumes.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.