Biographical Research Quotes

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

I'm an avid biography reader.

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

Anne Romaine collected her own parallel archive to [Alex] Haley.

It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

I don't know that there has ever been a time when Abraham Lincoln didn't stand head-and-shoulders above all other presidents in the historians' eye. But relatively speaking, there have been peaks and a troughs. One peak was in the 1910s-20s; a major trough was in the 1970s-80s. We are certainly on a peak again, something which began in 1994 with Michael Burlingame's 'The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln,' which showed in fabulous detail how many new and untapped sources were available on Lincoln.

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.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

Malcolm X had a habit of scribbling notes in small pieces of paper that [Alex] Haley would surreptitiously pick up at the end of their discussions.

Let me put it in a positive light, with that archive [of Anne Romaine], we have gained extensive knowledge about how [Alex] Haley and Malcolm X actually worked and how the book, the autobiography, was constructed.

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.

It was a great challenge to reconstruct Gypsy Rose Lee life, and my interviews with her sister [June Havoc] proved invaluable. It's not often that writers have access to living primary source material; this was the only person who experienced life on the vaudeville circuit with Gypsy during the 1920s, and who saw her perform at Minsky's Burlesque in the 1930s. She knew things that no one else could ever possibly know.

The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.

I started by studying Kiswahili to learn the dialect. Then, I studied tapes, documentaries, footage, and audio cassettes of Idi Amin's speeches. And I met with his brothers, his sisters, his ministers, his generals' all kinds of people, in order to try to understand him.

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.

I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.

There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done.

There were no clippings of Ambedkar. The only thing I had was a two-and-a-half minute film which I saw countless times. Nobody knows how he walked, how he spoke, or how he behaved. I had to conceive all those things in my mind. I had to work a lot on the make-up, too.

I first wrote a biography of Thomas Carlyle, and it turned out I loved writing biographies and had a talent for it. I believed I had a contribution to make.

I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.

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

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.