Kitty Kelley Quotes

I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

[Jimmy] Breslin's [write] really great book on Branch Rickey. And Branch Rickey himself wrote quite a lot. There's some film and kinescope from television.

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

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

I had an insanely long commute - New York to D.C. - when I worked at 'National Geographic.' I hate to waste time, so I spent my time by writing about my life on the premise that I might be able to pitch those as short essays to magazines. It wasn't until later that I realized that I was writing a book.

One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'

I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.

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.

I wouldn't want to write a biography of anyone. I'd feel too inhibited by the facts and too much pressure to do the subject's life justice.

I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.

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

Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons.

Make a list of 200 prestigious, influential, and powerful people with whom you want to work, play, grow and do business.

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

It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.

The parallel circumstances and kindred images to which we readily conform our minds are, above all other writings, to be found in the lives of particular persons, and therefore no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography.

A journal is a very personal thing. As far as possible, to write this sort of book you need to know and feel your character as a person and then put yourself into that person's mind, place and time. Trying to stay in that person, place and time is a challenge when surrounded by this very different world of the 21st century.

But as I wrote the book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet], I tried to write it as clearly and directly and passionately as possible just thinking of communicating to readers who might want to learn about this great thinker and be inspired by him as I was.

Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography.

Somebody said, "Well, you're going to write your definitive book about your life, biography." No, I'm not. I haven't done that. I wrote a book of letters which gives an insight into the real me as opposed to the public perceptions of me. But I'm convinced historians will figure out the things we got wrong and hopefully the things we got right.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.

Powerful people come from all walks of life and leave their mark upon the world in a variety of ways. But one thing is common to them all. They move through the world with pure vitality. It is as though all their switches have been turned on.

I'm sure my first nine years have had a powerful influence on the kind of books I write.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.