A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

I read everything: fiction history science mathematics biography travel.

Travel books are by and large boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact fiction and autobiography.

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.

After reading Eminem's autobiography which I did because I'm so interested in him as an artist I respect him a lot. Even though he seems angry and mad he's had to fight so many demons in his life.

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

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

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.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

Great writing can be done in biography history art.

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.

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.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

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

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

I got out of autobiography because my story is I was famous it was hard for me I got into therapy. I had trouble with food I got a nutritionist. There's no story there.

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.

I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story.

I had lost faith in biography.