Every man has his disciples, and it’s always Judas who writes the biography
May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.
I'm an avid biography reader.
I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.
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.
'Colonel Roosevelt' is compelling reading, and Morris a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level.
I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.
Ray Bradbury published his first story 29 years before I was born. He established himself as an international writer long before I arrived. When my mom was nine months pregnant with me, my father read Bradbury aloud to her as I listened intently, in utero. And I later became his biographer.
Schlesinger was that rare thing, a historian and a maker of history.
In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it.
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.
To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.
Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
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.
And when her biographer says of an Italian woman poet, 'during some years her Muse was intermitted,' we do not wonder at the fact when he casually mentions her ten children.
'Empire of Self' is a loving portrait of a very difficult man. Jay Parini, himself a gifted novelist, poet and biographer, has gone very deep into the 'black energy' of Gore Vidal's relentless narcissism and megalomania. Parini envisions an epic battle between Vidal's angelic and demonic sides, yet there's very little of the angel in Vidal.
Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.
A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.
The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.
A supreme pragmatist, Kissinger was never interested in the art of the impossible - and nor, as a biographer, am I. That is why, having initially been invited to write his entire official biography, I eventually decided to devote myself to writing just one year in his life: 1973.
I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.
There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
I think I've had 16 books that purport to be a biography of me. I've never cooperated with someone.
My biographer said that my parties reminded them of a vicarage tea party, with sex thrown in.
