Robert Caro Quotes

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

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

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'

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

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

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.

Biography is the best history.

I read a lot of biographies, and so much is just so boring or so, like, 'Why did you say that?'

Much more than memoir; it's history.

I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom.

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.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

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 like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

I would like to continue to tell stories of what I did in a biographical way, so I will continue to write.

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

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.

It's kind of hard to tell your life story and state all facts and it still be sweet.

'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.

Everyone's always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not.

You write an autobiography because you want to tell people how you felt about a certain matter at that time.

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.