Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Biography is the best history.

Biography is the best form of history.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

It has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public.

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!

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

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

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.

My autobiography was simply the story of my life.

I told my whole life story in my book.

I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

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.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium

My 'Report to Greco' is not an autobiography.

I didn't really want to write something about my life story. I've kind of had a pretty smooth-sailing journey.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

I've had three biographies made about my life so people know an awful lot about me.