Quotes About My Biography

#1. The most frequent thing people said to me about Princess Diana when I was conducting interviews for my biography was that she could create a circle of intimacy in the middle of a crowd.

Tina Brown

#2. I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#3. If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

Fernando Pessoa

#4. When I'm dead, somebody can write my biography. I wrote a national hymn, an anthem, which I don't want to present to that country. But I have a deal with my wife - when I'm dead, she should offer it, because then I'm safe.

Giorgio Moroder

#5. What's bad about my biography? My father was a worker, my brothers, too, and I have always honestly served my country.

Ivan Bagramyan

#6. The girl in the red coat would remain the the sweet but sore point in my biography: the promise never kept; the mystery that would always remain a mystery. And yet, I regretted nothing. Someday it would be less painful. Someday my heart would be light again. I had to only let it happen.

Nicolas Barreau

#7. That requires quite an imaginative leap because it's hard for me to imagine that my biography would be of much interest to anyone, and because I'm a fairly private person, the notion doesn't appeal to me.

Debra Dean

#8. So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.

Michael Palin

#9. Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

Clara Barton

#10. When I was writing my biography of LeBon," Bob Nye told me, "he seemed to me the biggest asshole in the whole of creation.

Jon Ronson

#11. I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs. To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness.

Thomas McGuane

#12. I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.

Eleanor Catton

#13. ...That is my biography from the first day of my chess life to the present.

JOURNALIST. And your plans.
PLAYER. To play!

Mikhail Tal

#14. It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.

Gretchen Rubin

#15. My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

Kitty Kelley

#16. My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

Reza Aslan

#17. A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

Robert Dessaix

#18. 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.

Robert Caro

#19. One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography.

Theodor Haecker

#20. I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

John Irving

#21. Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters.

Jan Wong

#22. Biography is the only true history.

Thomas Carlyle

#23. I would spend my life on the road logging hundreds of thousands of miles and my story was always the same. . . man comes to town, detonates; man leaves town and drives off into the evening; fade to black. Just the way I like it.

Bruce Springsteen

#24. I have long since chosen him for my only good, my all; my pleasure, my happiness in this world as in the world to come... -Susanna Wesley

Arnold A. Dallimore

#25. I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,' I say. 'I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.

Paul Murray

#26. I was born in the house my father built.

Richard M. Nixon

#27. I was walking home alone from school and I was wearing a dress. A dude drove by and yelled, "Nice tits." Embarrassed and enraged, I screamed after him, "Suck my dick.

Tina Fey

#28. When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.

George Vecsey

#29. It is the most horrific thought - my husband died among strangers.

Joyce Carol Oates

#30. I feel I have to live a little longer before I write a sequel to my auto biography which covers my experiences up until October 1991.

Holly Johnson

#31. I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

Jeanette Winterson

#32. I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.

Amity Shlaes

#33. When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I'm tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else's life offends my vanity.

Michael Dirda

#34. I was born with my eyes turned inward.

David Joseph Cribbin

#35. I have had a lot of readers of my book tell me that they like it, but so far only two reviews have been listed. Could you help?

Rollis Fontenot Jr

#36. I was reading William Shawcross's biography of the Queen Mother, dressed in my witch outfit! And you know what? It was a really good mix; it was a therapeutic mix.

Helena Bonham Carter

#37. There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.

Arthur Wing Pinero

#38. I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.

David Levering Lewis

#39. Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely - perhaps never - furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you've ruined both our lives.

Joyce Carol Oates

#40. Later in life the force of abstinence was to really be understood and my parent's problems became very clear. When will man appreciate his pleasures and respect them enough to indulge in moderation?

Theresa Sjoquist

#41. My dear, it is very nice here, every day two or three persons are stabbed by soldiers in the city; there are daily arrests, but apart from these it is pretty gay..

Rosa Luxemburg

#42. Was he a good father?"
To their surprise, I shake my head and smile. "No," I reply candidly. "He wasn't a good father, but he was a good man."
Where Dad came from, that meant a great deal more.

Deana Martin

#43. While some people are good at painting, playing an instrument or singing, I have been told more than once I am good at storytelling. I hope that you enjoy my stories as I recall them.

Eric Arrouze

#44. I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.

David Levering Lewis

#45. In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.

Mordecai Richler

#46. The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#47. I'm narrating the television series Biography. I'm still involved in my music - I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I'm writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project.

Bill Mumy

#48. There began to appear before my romantic eyes ... a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.

Erik Larson

#49. What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

Roland Barthes

#50. My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life.

Justin Hayward

#51. Why should I be limited by my own biography?

Eleanor Antin

#52. I want the 'Book of Basketball' to do well if only so I can shop an absolutely ridiculous topic for my next book: like, a book about basketball cards, or an unauthorized biography of A. J. Daulerio.

Bill Simmons

#53. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

Norman Spinrad

#54. That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can't confront it.

Joyce Carol Oates

#55. I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.

Dawn French

#56. I decided I had to find out if it was my scene or not. So I stepped in at the deep end. It leads you to survive or drown. Very often you survive.

Theresa Sjoquist

#57. I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'

Jamie Cullum

#58. Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?

James Hillman

#59. In my small way I became an integral part of the pottery movement, and added fuel to the fire which consumed New Zealand and and swept pottery to the forefront of the of the fifties and sixties.

Theresa Sjoquist

#60. I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

Jonathan Coe

#61. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

Don DeLillo

#62. That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.

Don DeLillo

#63. A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

Alan Ayckbourn

#64. I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.

Joyce Carol Oates

#65. I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

Philip Roth

#66. Courage, kindness and a great determination to succeed in life with a smile were hallmarks of my wonderful wife. And why her story deserves to be told.

Paul Roberts

#67. None of my friends had grandparents like these. ... Tony and Desolina were exotic.

James Vescovi

#68. My first biography written in '73 was not 'Journey To The Moon.' It was 'Return To Earth.' Because for me, that was the more difficult task - disappointment.

Buzz Aldrin

#69. I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

Antonia Fraser

#70. Once undressed I felt less exposed. (...) Naked was my uniform. (...) There was no pressure to conform.

Aiden Shaw

#71. Oftentimes, if a writer really gets her hooks into me, I'll want to read interviews, or listen to an interview, or read a literary biography or a memoir of some kind. And doing so almost always deepens my enjoyment of the author and her work.

Brad Listi

#72. When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography - Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book.

Douglas Brinkley

#73. I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.

Anne Spollen

#74. It's the only dish I serve my craziness for color in.

Josef Albers

#75. I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.

Charles Babbage

#76. My first biography was 'Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.' To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.

David A. Adler

#77. I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

Peter Ackroyd

#78. Behind the door was where bad things happen. No matter how many blankets I used or extra pairs of panties I wore. None of it mattered. The monster always came. His face obscured in the shadows, partially hidden behind the cloak rack. Hot breath breathing over my face as soon as I closed my eyes.

Hannah Baston

#79. I have my own biography of Gram Parsons - I don't want to be part of somebody else's.

Emmylou Harris

#80. The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

Christine Quinn

#81. I have heard the most fantastical gossip about myself and each time I thought, "If only my life were that exciting, fun, outrageous, and sexy". Then again my memory wasn't so sharp when I took drugs. Some of what was said about me might be true. At worst it gave me jerk-off material.

Aiden Shaw

#82. To show the American woman herself off to best advantage - that has always been my aim and that is my real biography.

Hattie Carnegie

#83. I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.

Margot Asquith

#84. I rely on my iPad for on-the-go entertainment. I stock it with TV shows, like 'Parks and Recreation' and the British version of 'The Office.' I'm reading a Charles Manson biography on it too, since I'm weirdly into true crime.

Phoebe Tonkin

#85. I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!

Stephen Greenblatt

#86. To me, that's the ultimate isolation - to be separated from my own mind.

James Patterson

#87. Awake, my soul! Why should I give hours and days any longer to the vain world, when there is such a world of misery at my very door? Lord, put thine own strength in me; confirm every good resolution; forgive my past long life of uselessness and folly.

Andrew Bonar

#88. Mom brought me some peanut butter cookies and a biography of Judy Garland. She told me she thought my problem was that I was too impatient, my fuse was too short, that I was only interested in instant gratification. I said, "Instant gratification takes too long." The glib martyr.

Carrie Fisher