Biographical Detail Quotes

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you're offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.

I was not an athlete in college.

Strange as it may seem, George Washington's life has now been so minutely documented that we know far more about him than did his own friends, family, and contemporaries.

That's how I got my name, you know. The Bonny scot, see?

I don’t know if you want to include this but Grant had a cigar clamped in his mouth the entire time.

Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again.

I think 'Comic Book: The Movie' is the apex of my career in terms of making a personal statement that has significance to me and resonates with biographical detail about not only my career, but all the people that I've worked with in my career. All of it's riddled, on- and off-camera, with people I've known and worked with for decades.

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 writers of history seem to entertain an aristocratical contempt for the writers of memoirs. They think it beneath the dignity of men who describe the revolutions of nations to dwell on the details which constitute the charm of biography.

I'm not one of those people who writes a biography or tries to figure out what kind of ice cream the character liked when he was 10.

My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago.

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

Few people know that I grew up in Germany and that my family still lives there.