“Johnson argued that the most truthful life-writing is when ‘the writer tells his own story’, since only he knows the whole truth about himself. (He does not use the word ‘autobiography’, which only came into circulation in the early 19th… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“Johnson argued that the most truthful life-writing is when ‘the writer tells his own story’, since only he knows the whole truth about himself.… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“I lost count of the incidences of "We can imagine" or "It is safe to imagine" or "We can speculate" or "We can picture… — Hermione Lee 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 essential self,… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
Writing a biography is not a love affair. It’s not a marriage. It’s a job, it’s a piece of work. — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it's a good death. Make sure you're not picking someone who just declined. — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
