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

- Conrad Veidt

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.

- John Irving

You can't leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.

- Iain Sinclair

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

- George Plimpton

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

- Gore Vidal

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

- Eric Bentley

I have my own biography of Gram Parsons - I don't want to be part of somebody else's.

- Emmylou Harris

I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.

- Eleanor Catton

It's important to begin a biography or any book or story with something to draw the reader in.

- David A. Adler

I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.

- Douglas Brinkley

I had lost faith in biography.

- A. N. Wilson

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

- Claire Tomalin

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

- Cilla Black

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

- Carlos Fuentes

I'm an avid biography reader.

- Brent Spiner

I want the 'Book of Basketball' to do well if only so I can shop an absolutely ridiculous topic for my next book: like, a book about basketball cards, or an unauthorized biography of A. J. Daulerio.

- Bill Simmons

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.

- Anthony Powell

I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'

- Alexandra Roach

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

- A. Scott Berg

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

- Arthur Balfour