Born in Manhattan, Clifford Irving graduated from the High School of Music & Art as an art major and then Cornell University (with honors in English).

He has traveled throughout the world, sailed the Atlantic in a 3-masted schooner, lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, in a prison cell in Connecticut, for many years on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, and twice served as a correspondent to the Middle East. He taught for a time at UCLA and has lectured in three continents on subjects as diverse as Howard Hughes, the art market, and the justice system.

He has three sons, two ex-wives, and is married now for the last time to his beloved Julie, from Sydney, Australia. They live on the Pacific coast of Mexico and on a Colorado mountainside, where Julie imports silks from Asia and cooks haute cuisine, and Clifford hikes, skis, practices yoga, hugs trees, writes and paints. He describes his life as "blessed."