Ron Chernow Quotes

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

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

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

Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

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.

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.

I'm an avid biography reader.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

I had lost faith in biography.

I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.