Top Biography Quotes
One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.
William Ellery Channing
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.
Rebecca West
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Mark Twain
Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Robert Hall
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.
Robert Caro
All Biography Quotes
One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.
William Ellery Channing 
68% of people like this quote
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.
Rebecca West 
61% of people like this quote
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Mark Twain 
61% of people like this quote
Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Robert Hall 
59% of people like this quote
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.
David Herbert Donald 
58% of people like this quote
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.
Robert Caro 
58% of people like this quote
My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life.
Justin Hayward 
58% of people like this quote
Popular Biography Authors
Mark TwainOscar WildeBenjamin DisraeliThomas CarlyleAnthony TrollopeJohn Kenneth GalbraithJohn UpdikeGuillermo Cabrera InfanteJose Ortega y GassetLawrence WelkRebecca WestWilliam Ellery ChanningTodd GitlinKathy GriffinBarbara Kruger
Carter G. WoodsonWalter Jon WilliamsAlbert FinneyAntonia FraserJohn IrvingThomas SzaszAnita BrooknerJonathan CoeMark ShieldsRichard AttenboroughV. S. NaipaulPamela StephensonConrad VeidtLytton StracheyNorman Spinrad
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Benjamin Disraeli
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Brent Spiner
John Irving
Arthur Balfour
Rebecca West
Jonathan Coe
Martin Lewis Perl