Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's. — Milan Kundera Copy Share Image
Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs. — Claire Tomalin Copy Share Image
“One of Beethoven’s biographers listed the three greatest and hardest human tasks as heroism, childbirth, and creative work. For” — Peter Kreeft Copy Share Image
How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject. — Amity Shlaes Copy Share Image
The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic. — Victoria Glendinning Copy Share Image
If we could believe that Jesus...countenanced the follies, falsehoods and charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, ...the conclusion would be irresistible...that… — Thomas Jefferson Copy Share Image
Authorised royal biographers are so straitjacketed, deferential, fawning, and unadventurous that they can only be after a knighthood. Or they're completely scurrilous… — Peter Morgan Copy Share Image
Ronald Reagan's biographer wrote of the former president's final days: "for all the intimate familiarity of that face and body, I did… — Edwin Morris Copy Share Image
Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier… — Louise Brooks Copy Share Image
Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of… — Amity Shlaes Copy Share Image
All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be… — Gloria Steinem Copy Share Image
a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Lyndon Johnson (with Abraham Lincoln close behind). Johnson was able to get things done, to read other people, and to adjust his… — Jeffrey Pfeffer Copy Share Image
The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
“Biographers are not usually as explicit as philosophers such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Austin, or Moore on questions of the existence of an… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
If we believe that he [Jesus Christ]really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the New… — Thomas Jefferson Copy Share Image
Let us have our heroes. Let us continue to believe that some have been truly great; that it lies within human ability… — Lyndon Baines Johnson Copy Share Image
"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings… — Marian Seldes Copy Share Image
every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Any good biography has to got to lead you to the work. Many biographers have started out in love with their subjects… — D. T. Max Copy Share Image
biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer. — Linda Simon Copy Share Image
Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood. — Anne Applebaum Copy Share Image
I am well aware that the path of the biographer is beset with pitfalls, and that, for him, suppressio veri is almost… — Stuart Dodgson Collingwood Copy Share Image
The authorized biographers - the ones hand-picked to write the sanitized version of a subject's life - sit up front with the… — Kitty Kelley Copy Share Image
In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves… — Miriam Makeba Copy Share Image
“For the biographer, the final clue to character lies in the yet unread - the scribbled note, the diary page, a notation… — Laura Furman Copy Share Image
In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded… — Darryl Pinckney Copy Share Image
This is a glorious biography ... The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on… — Mark Bostridge Copy Share Image
And she [Eleanor Roosevelt]loves being a star. And she loves being a teacher and a leader and a mentor and a big… — Blanche Wiesen Cook Copy Share Image
Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him (i.e. Jesus) by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality,… — Thomas Jefferson Copy Share Image
while it is certainly the biographer's business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work… — Iris Origo Copy Share Image
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Copy Share Image
Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive. — Catherine Drinker Bowen Copy Share Image
Every business should have its biographer-not after its head is dead but to show that he's very much alive. — Frank Pierson Copy Share Image