Quotes About Biography

William Manchester and Paul Reid's Defender of the Realm, Roy Jenkins's Churchill, and Martin Gilbert's Finest Hour—but then to plunge

bisexual. I don't need Ethan to pull a Byron," I said, amused, adjusting my shoes. "I kind of like him faithful and into girls, specifically me." Aubrey and I had been friends first, paired together in a bio lab as freshmen, and through her, I had met Ethan. It had started out between us as a quiet friendship but had grown into something more as I realized that he was solid. Loyal. Hashtag No Drama. Unlike some people who had

On THE DECSIVE DUEL: SPITFIRE VS 109 The epic struggle between the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt 109 upon which so much of western civilization depended in the summer of 1940 has found the ideal biographer in David Isby. I write "biographer" because, like the men who flew these remarkable fighter planes, Isby sees them in almost human terms, transcending the mere mechanical. (Andrew Roberts, Author Of The Storm Of War )

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

'The Butler' has virtually nothing in common with its source material, the life of White House butler Gene Allen, except for the fact that the main character of the film and Allen were both black butlers in the White House.

The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.

I soon abandoned the question of who Kurban Said or Essad Bey was for the more problematic one - who was Lev Nussimbaum?

For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.

I wouldn't want to write a biography of anyone. I'd feel too inhibited by the facts and too much pressure to do the subject's life justice.

To do a movie about someone who actually lived gives you two responsibilities. You have to try to be accurate to the facts of what he did and what he was like as a character. Then, at the same time, you have a responsibility to make a movie that entertains and can get an audience.

Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.

I had first heard about Alan Turing when I was a teenager. I've known about him since I was a kid, and I always wanted to write about him.

And even as the chariot of time hustles me along, I never forget that Bob Caro is coming up from behind with volume five of LBJ. I hope he makes it. I hope I make it.

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.

It is part of the received doctrine of modern biography that all characters are Flawed, and as a Christian priest I am quite ready to agree, but the Flaws the biographers exhibited usually meant that the person under discussion had not seen eye to eye with the biographer on matters of politics, or social betterment, or something impersonal.

Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

I want to see Hamilton.

This wasn't someone I had encountered in any biography.

Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be.

when writing a biography, you can't trust certainties. Just as you're about to pounce on something that will condemn you to a tidy answer, pooooofff! It vanishes.