Kitty Kelley Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

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.

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.

I had lost faith in biography.

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

To the biographer all lives bar none are dramatic constructions.

I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn't tell it like it was.

I'm an avid biography reader.

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

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.

I am a huge fan of biographies. What I'm always looking for is a story. I want a story I have never heard from anyone else.

I gave up the notion of writing the life of Joan of Arc, as I found that there was absolutely no new material to be gleaned on her history - in fact, she had been thrashed out.

... more snobbish than their English butlers.

The big, big block in the Arthur/Merlin friendship is the status issue, that Merlin is the servant and Arthur is royalty, and in that time, princes did not socialize with their servants; that wasn't the done thing. It just so happens that their relationship, their friendship, is strong: they have been through the thick and the thin of it all.

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.

I have many times marveled at how I could feel so good about myself while eating peanuts in a middle seat on Southwest Airlines and yet feel so condescended to in first class on United.

I've always been a person that thinks nonfiction is more interesting than fiction, I love to read presidential biographies.

He remembered poor Julian [actually F. Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."