Biography Quotes

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

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

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

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

The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

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

I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

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.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

I was reading William Shawcross's biography of the Queen Mother, dressed in my witch outfit! And you know what? It was a really good mix; it was a therapeutic mix.

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.

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 a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.

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.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

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.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

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 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.

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

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.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

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.

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

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

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.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

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.