Biographical Account Quotes

There is properly no history; only biography.

Biography is the best history.

Let This Voice Be Heard fulfills the mandate of biography at its best because Maurice Jackson has captured the history of a great moral movement's origins in a single, extraordinary life. An indispensable addition to the antislavery bibliography.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

I told my whole life story in my book.

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 friends have made the story of my life.

I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.

I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.

This is the best biography by me I have ever read.

I think I've had 16 books that purport to be a biography of me. I've never cooperated with someone.

If it is properly done, the 'as told to' autobiography represents how the subject wants his story told.

There's a hidden history. You see, Malcolm X and [Alex ] Haley collaborated to produce a magnificent narrative about the life of Malcolm X, but the two men had very different motives in coming together.

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.

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

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.

A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

I was going to write an autobiography once. I started writing it, and then I thought, 'No, let them dig around when I'm dead.'

The story follows the whole family. But pretty much all the characters who are in jail have written a book about it, so you've got their perspective of it, however skewed they want you to see it.

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

A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.

The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.

I was with Essien Udom in Nigeria.

I first met Walt Disney 25 or 30 years ago.

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else.