Suppose someone tried to write your biography. What nonsense! How much would he know? Would he know what you thought when you looked in the subway slot-machine? How brutally you spoke when you were angry? How Nature rode you with a busy spur? How you fell on your knees late at night?

She looked Spencer over, tip to toe, as though she were considering buying him. Then she smiled her friendliest smile and said, You're rather short, aren't you? Don't worry honey, said Mankiewicz, trying desperately to extinguish Spencer's glare. He'll cut you down to size.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but— mainly— to ourselves.

When we begin to reflect Christ, the Bible, when more understood as being centered around Christ, seems to be potentially every man's biography regarding God's promised experiences and truth for him - his individual, unique path of humbling oneself before the Lord and then being exalted by the Lord back into his true and righteous personhood. Many followers may speak of it merely to try to change other people (before changing themselves), but the prophets speak of it as a living word which miraculously tells their very own experiences.

Where I was born, and where and how I lived is unimportant. It is what I have done and where I have been that should be of interest.

To the biographer, all lives bar one are dramatic constructions.

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.

Biography is the only true history.

Biography is the best form of history.

Every great man has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography

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

No one had written a good long life of Schubert. He had lived long in music and short in life.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eaten and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

How inexpressibly comfortable to know our fellow-creature; to see into him, understand his goings-forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it.

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier spiced with expensive names.

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

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.