Alive Quote by Catherine Drinker Bowen

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

Any good biography has to got to lead you to the work. Many biographers have started out in love with their subjects and ended…

— D. T. Max

“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

When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.

— Ron Chernow

I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom.

— Richard Rhodes

As a biographer, I try to uncover the adventures and personalities behind each character I research. Once my character and I have reached an…

— Jean Fritz

Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.

— Claire Tomalin

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

— Thomas Carlyle

I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.

— Walter Isaacson

Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too…

— Walter Savage Landor

History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around.…

— David McCullough

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

— Barry Unsworth