I read every biography [of Jackie Kennedy] I could get my hands on.
I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.
I wanted to make a film that wasn't just a biography. When you watched it, you actually felt that you watched a movie, that you had an emotional reaction. In order to do that, I felt that I had to really keep myself emotionally raw while working on the film. I had to feel myself crying, so the audience could be moved, too.
I grew up reading biographies on groups, and I love all that. The thing about biographies, it's the old cliché but it's true - a lot of the time these things are more about the author than they are about the group.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
Geniuses have the shortest biographies.
I hate biographies which say, I was called to such and such an office, and he offered me so and so, and I got so and so money. I find that very tedious. The best biographies are written by other people.
It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose; ce que nous ignorons est immense. What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.
Somebody approached me about writing a biography on me, I told them they were too late.
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.
Are you feeling helpless when you think about the dark roads of the future? Then read the biographies of the great men! Learn their life stories; they will lead you to the light! Buddha will lead you to the light; Gandhi will lead you to the light! Men of wider horizons will broaden our own horizons!
I feel I have to live a little longer before I write a sequel to my auto biography which covers my experiences up until October 1991.
I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.