As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Norman Spinrad

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

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
Philip Guedalla

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
John Arbuthnot

Biography lends to death a new terror.
Oscar Wilde

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
Arthur Balfour

Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be.
Philip Guedalla

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.
John Updike

Discretion is not the better part of biography.
Lytton Strachey

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

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.
Louis L'Amour

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.
Eric Bentley

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

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.
Jonathan Coe

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.
Edmund White

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.
Jonathan Dimbleby

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

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.
Dawn French