Attack Quote by Claire Tomalin

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

— Arthur Balfour

The enemy of a writer is not controversy but obscurity.

— William P. Young

“And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they…

— Kate Zambreno

The most exquisite words and finest strokes of an author are those which very often appear the most doubtful and exceptionable to a man…

— Joseph Addison

You can call someone a lousy writer. You can say you hate their book. You can even call a person 'white trash' but you…

— Carole Radziwill

I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better…

— Penelope Fitzgerald

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

I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery…

— Carolyn Wells

Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms…

— Emily Susan Rapp

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

— William Golding

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for…

— Fran Lebowitz

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

— Peter Ackroyd