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.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.

Parents - especially step-parents - are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Books do furnish a room.

Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

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.

The army is at once the worst place for egoists, and the best.

Self love seems so often unrequited.

Growing old is like beingincreasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

I'm an avid biography reader.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

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 became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.

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

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

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.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

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 just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.

What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.

John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.