Top 133 Biography Quotes

I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.

I like film books at the bottom of the barrel and art books at the top. ‘The Ghastly One,’ by Jimmy McDonough, is a hilarious biography of one of the most hideous directors who ever picked up a movie camera – Andy Milligan.

When I was working on the unauthorized biography ‘Stan Musial: An American Life,’ which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

When I was a boy, I began writing a biography of Shakespeare, and since then I’ve written a number of biographies of actors and famous people.

My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

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.

People think that because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

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 first wrote a biography of Thomas Carlyle, and it turned out I loved writing biographies and had a talent for it. I believed I had a contribution to make.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, ‘The Grocer’s Daughter.’

I am reading the biography of Pep Guardiola. I find it really interesting.

I didn’t want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, ‘Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.’

Biography lends to death a new terror.

I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they’re clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I’m not worried about whether I’m clever.

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

I was excited when I first got the call, when I heard BBC Four were making a biography and they were interested in me being a part of it.

My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life.

I read a lot of science fiction and biography – these are my two favorite genres. My favorite science fiction writers are Hertling, Suarez, Gibson and Stephenson, but I enjoy many others. I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.

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.

Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you’re actively miserable.

I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and ‘the life of the mind’ – and now, such subjects have become my life.

I don’t think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer’s view is always something to keep in mind.

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).

Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.

A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

My life is very simple, it is not worth being written into a biography, for that ‘masala’ is required.

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

I’m completely absorbed by Peter Guralnick’s definitive, two-part biography of Elvis Presley: ‘Last Train To Memphis’ and ‘Careless Love.’ Meticulously researched, this is a compelling mix of history, myth-busting, and, of course, some timeless music.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person’s biography.

My first biography was ‘Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.’ To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

Aaranya Kaandam’ is not the biography or history of a gangster but a page out of the life of a gangster. It is like a day in his life.

Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.

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

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

You can’t leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.

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.

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

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don’t read all that much about the period you’re writing about; read things from the period that you’re writing about. There’s a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence’s biography on him, ‘Hold on to Your Dreams,’ one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

I went on a Buddha jag. I read ‘Confession of a Buddhist Atheist’ by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong’s biography of Buddha, which is a great book.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person’s biography.

I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.

Read something of interest every day – something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.

A supreme pragmatist, Kissinger was never interested in the art of the impossible – and nor, as a biographer, am I. That is why, having initially been invited to write his entire official biography, I eventually decided to devote myself to writing just one year in his life: 1973.

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 think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

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 don’t put myself into the category of ‘rock star writing his biography.’ That’s because we live our lives by falling into experiences. Things happen to us. Something you do takes hold of you, and then you do a lot of it.

I’m narrating the television series Biography. I’m still involved in my music – I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I’m writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project.

Writing Charles Dickens’ biography is like writing five biographies.

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.

When things are scary, or there’s a struggle, I always think, ‘How is this going to sound in my biography?’ Sometimes I would just be living on protein shakes or the cheapest food that I could afford because I didn’t have a lot of money.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell’s biography – there’s an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s not how it happened.

I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.

The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre.

Ultimately, Cole Porter’s music might say more about his life than any biography could. His songs, with their witty lyrics and debonair style, are an advertisement for his personality and his public persona.

When I read Andrew Motion’s biography, I wept. It’s something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.

I had lost faith in biography.

At night, I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, ‘The Round House.’ But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work.

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.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

It’s so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned – mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill – that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.

I never really endeavored to hide anything. But there were times I chose not to relegate my history to the back page of a magazine, which to me is sort of akin to putting your biography on a bathroom wall.

It’s time for male leaders to not only ask for binders of qualified women, but to re-write the definition of ‘qualified.’ The best man for the job, may in fact, be a woman, whose biography is not traditional, but is rich with experiences and skills that are not necessarily learned either in school or on the job.

I have always felt a special affinity with V. S. Pritchett. He worked from the ear, primarily, as I do, and he was an all-rounder, writing short stories, novels, memoir, travelogue, critical biography. He lived to be almost 100, and he never stopped, and his work is unified by a great generosity of spirit.

It’s important to begin a biography or any book or story with something to draw the reader in.

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

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.

This is the best biography by me I have ever read.

I would like to write my biography sometime. I love to write. I could write for weeks and weeks, maybe say nothing but just for the writing.

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.’

I like vampires, tuberculosis, anything to do with blood. Then I read a biography of Rasputin and found out he’d had this daughter who had become a famous lion tamer and been billed as the daughter of the mad monk who was able to hypnotize animals with her eyes. It gave me a vision.

I don’t put myself into the category of ‘rock star writing his biography.’ That’s because we live our lives by falling into experiences. Things happen to us. Something you do takes hold of you, and then you do a lot of it.

I’ve read every Madonna biography. I’ve also looked up every pop star to see how they first made it. The biggest thing I learnt was that you have to be pro-active. You can’t be scared.

Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so – look at the Bible, crammed with biographies, very popular reading.

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

I liked Tom Bower’s biography of Bernie Ecclestone, the former Formula 1 boss.

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for ‘The Nation’ in the ’60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term ‘Christian,’ it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

I think that I’m busy in the present, and I don’t want to go back. Well, there’s been an unauthorized biography, and you can’t stop them. It didn’t worry me.

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.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

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.

Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin’s biography written for children.

I’ve always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book – which would be anything from a biography to a classic – to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

I started reading the Carlos Baker biography of Dad but couldn’t finish it. I had the impression I was reading about a guy who, well, just wouldn’t be very nice to be around. I wish Baker could have known Dad because exactly the opposite was true.

I rely on my iPad for on-the-go entertainment. I stock it with TV shows, like ‘Parks and Recreation’ and the British version of ‘The Office.’ I’m reading a Charles Manson biography on it too, since I’m weirdly into true crime.

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.

Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.

I don’t consider ‘American Rose’ to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy’s tumultuous life – it’s ‘Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.’

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

I was obsessed with Lil’ Bow Wow growing up, and you couldn’t see the white of my walls because they were plastered with his photos. This is even more embarrassing: I had a notebook full of facts about Bow Wow and different pictures. I basically made a biography notebook about him and his life when he was, like, 13.

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.

The most frequent thing people said to me about Princess Diana when I was conducting interviews for my biography was that she could create a circle of intimacy in the middle of a crowd.

I’m suspicious of the idea of categories in music and this idea of things being in boxes. To me, that seems unnatural. I write the music that somebody with my biography would write, and the thing that’s always driven me is an enthusiasm for the material. I sort of follow the notes to where they want to go.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction – in which I’ll include memoir, biography, and true crime – is that one relieves the other.

I just love biography, and I’m fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

I think I’ve had 16 books that purport to be a biography of me. I’ve never cooperated with someone.

What’s weird is that anybody can write anything, and once it goes online, it’s permanent. My very first biography on IMDb, which was written by a manager I had at the time, was not true.

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.

One day I’ll bring a biography of my life out and that will be the biggest joke I’ll ever tell.

The rumors of Frank Sinatra’s violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.

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

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.

I loved Victoria Glendinning’s bio of Vita Sackville-West. I also loved Michael Holroyd’s immense biography of Lytton Strachey.

I’m not one of those people who writes a biography or tries to figure out what kind of ice cream the character liked when he was 10.

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

I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress… It’s like a secret society up there.

John Kerry’s biography was central to his campaign.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

What you seem to find when you get into this biography business is that people tend to have an image of themselves that they want to project, and they want to color statements by this image.

The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness.

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

Once you choose to run for president of the United States and succeed, your earlier life, your biography, is a major part of American history.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can’t interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they’re gone and people are more willing to talk about them.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone’s letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

My first biography written in ’73 was not ‘Journey To The Moon.’ It was ‘Return To Earth.’ Because for me, that was the more difficult task – disappointment.

I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn’t tell it like it was.

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

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

I just want everybody to know that I’m opposed to an unauthorized biography on anybody.