Peter Morgan Quotes

Boswell is the first of biographers.

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

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

To the biographer all lives bar none are dramatic constructions.

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.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'

Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.

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

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 transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.

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.

I read a lot of biographies, and so much is just so boring or so, like, 'Why did you say that?'

Make subtlety obvious.

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

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

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

I don't give you editorial control. I want to meet you. I want to interview everybody who's ever known you. I want to see your correspondence. I want to see your bank statements. But you will have no control over what I write. That's why I really believe in the unauthorized biography.

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.

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.

With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.

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.