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.