Kitty Kelley Quotes

Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.

If you're writing an impartial proper biography, you speak to everyone around them who really know them, you do not need, unless you're a minister of propaganda, to have input from the person.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

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

Over the last two years, I have been able to comb through The Prince's archives. I have been free to read his journals, diaries and many thousands of the letters.

If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don't know what was going on in the person's mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

For 'Seabiscuit', I interviewed 100 people I never met.

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

I'm an avid biography reader.

The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.

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

I had lost faith in biography.

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

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

I'm not a Lincoln expert, rather a biographer who has had the pleasure of reading much of what has been written about him from his lifetime to this year of his bicentennial. Some advice: Don't try that unless you have at least five years available.

Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.

The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

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

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

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

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.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. Or, what's impossible? What's a fantasy?

Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.

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.