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.
