Wealth & Money Quote by Leslie Caron

Caron’s irritation isn’t really with biography as a genre; it’s with résumé-as-narrative, the kind of life story that confuses a list of appointments and paychecks for a personality. When she mocks the “called to such and such an office” cadence, she’s skewering an industry habit: turning a career into a sequence of gatekeepers, offers, and amounts, as if the only plot worth tracking is who validated you and what they paid. It’s a performer’s complaint about bad storytelling - and, quietly, about power.

The sharper edge lands in the pivot: “The best biographies are written by other people.” On its face, it’s a commonsense point about perspective. Underneath, it’s an actress acknowledging the paradox of self-mythmaking. Stars are trained to deliver a version of themselves: charming, coherent, appropriately modest, never too messy. A self-written biography risks becoming another controlled performance, flattened by PR instincts and professional diplomacy. Caron is arguing for the value of an outsider’s freedom to be imprecise, even unflattering - to catch contradictions the subject would sand down.

There’s also a generational context embedded here. Caron came up in a studio-era culture that commodified private lives while enforcing public polish. Her boredom with transactional anecdotes reads like a refusal of that old bargain: your access for their narrative. The line is witty because it’s also a dare: if you want my story, don’t ask me to invoice it. Write it like it mattered.