Richard Rhodes Quotes

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

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

I had lost faith in biography.

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

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

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

The few words of a title are the hardest words for any author to come up with.

I just want to sit in my room and write books.

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.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

I'm an avid biography reader.

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'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

When I became obsessed with Winston Churchill, I wrote a book about Churchill. What a joy it was to write that book!

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.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.