I had lost faith in biography.
A. N. Wilson
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
A. S. Byatt
I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.
A. Scott Berg
You should not do an autobiography if you want to tell the truth. There are a lot of things I know about people. If I can't say something good about a person, I don't want to say anything. And since I don't want to say anything bad, I won't write a book.
Abraham A. Ribicoff
Film songs have so many creative limitations, but a private album is like an autobiography that reflects your state of mind.
Adnan Sami
I will surely pen my autobiography.
'Off With Their Heads' by Frances Marion. I love a showbusiness autobiography - and this one resonates because it's written by one of the great Hollywood screenwriters.
Adriana Trigiani
The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.
Aharon Appelfeld
Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.
Alain de Botton
One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.
Alastair Campbell
I think that I'm busy in the present, and I don't want to go back. Well, there's been an unauthorized biography, and you can't stop them. It didn't worry me.
Albert Finney
If it is properly done, the 'as told to' autobiography represents how the subject wants his story told.
Albert Murray
I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'
Alexandra Roach
A home should be an intimate autobiography of the things that you like. One of the things I'm so keen on expressing is that, if you don't do it for yourself, if you're always seeking affirmation from outside, you'll never have a home. It'll just be a house.
Alexandra Stoddard
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.
Alistair Horne
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
When you are playing somebody who did exist, and there is good source material on them, whether it is a biography or archives or experts, you would be stupid not to delve into them. But there is a point in the process where you leave the books alone, and instead, you focus on the script and creating your version.
Andrew Gower
If you're looking for a behind-the-scenes rock-n-roll biography, pick up Nikki Sixx's 'The Heroin Diaries'. If you want the world's most narcissistic high school yearbook, however, 'First Step 2 Forever' is your new bicycle.
Andrew Shaffer
The problem is that even as you reveal the mysteries in your past, you are accumulating them in the present; complete honesty is the stuff of post-mortem, not autobiography.
Andrew Solomon
Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
Anita Brookner
I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one!
In fact Sarah Palin has created more jobs than Obama has. She created eleven jobs fact-checking at the AP just for the Palin autobiography.
People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.
I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.
Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence's biography on him, 'Hold on to Your Dreams,' one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.
Many candidates use a political autobiography to sell their candidacy.
For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'
I don't put myself into the category of 'rock star writing his biography.' That's because we live our lives by falling into experiences. Things happen to us. Something you do takes hold of you, and then you do a lot of it.
Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.
I feel autobiographies should be written when you're retiring and there's so much to talk about as you've been working for so many years then. It becomes more interesting and there's more material to go in the autobiography.
I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.
If you publish Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, no one will read it but if it's Madhuri Dixit's or Madhubala's autobiography people will come and read it.
I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
When things are scary, or there's a struggle, I always think, 'How is this going to sound in my biography?' Sometimes I would just be living on protein shakes or the cheapest food that I could afford because I didn't have a lot of money.
I'd read Stone Cold's biography about how he lived on, like, raw potatoes, and I thought, this is all part of it. This is what wrestlers do, and this is what I'm going to do.
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story.
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.
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.
This sounds like my autobiography, but I thought this would be a good time to sound off about myself, as I think that I have been silent too long about my views and opinions.
An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.
I read a lot of science fiction and biography - these are my two favorite genres. My favorite science fiction writers are Hertling, Suarez, Gibson and Stephenson, but I enjoy many others. I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.
Since I've started working on my autobiography, I'm going to slow down work. I've decided to reduce my workload by not signing every film that comes my way.
I'm an avid biography reader.
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.