Art Quote by Erica Jong

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

“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

I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of…

— Stacy Schiff

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

— Louis Fischer

Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study.…

— Horace Mann

“In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known…

— Ira Bruce Nadel

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

Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust…

— Tom Paulin

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

— Barry Unsworth

There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.

— Henry David Thoreau

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

— A. Scott Berg

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It…

— Noel Riley Fitch