Balance Quote by A. S. Byatt

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

— Thomas Carlyle

Perhaps the best thing about biographies is that they enable us to slip the strictures of time and provide a bracing corrective to our…

— Eric Metaxas

As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever…

— Scott Lynch

“Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.”

— Deana J. Driver

Unfortunately, I'm not a history buff. I don't read biographies, except of some of those writers whom I've collected over the years - particularly…

— John Larroquette

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

— Mark Twain

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always…

— Rachel Holmes

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

— Antonia Fraser

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of…

— Janet Malcolm

As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way,…

— Henry Fielding

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the…

— Barbara Tuchman

Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false... In most instances, they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.

— Abraham Lincoln