Biographers Quote by Janet Malcolm

“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

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

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

— A. Scott Berg

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

“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

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

— Louis Fischer

The biographer's real business - if it is not too arrogant to say so - is simply this: to bring the dead to life.

— Iris Origo

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

— Catherine Drinker Bowen

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

— Carlos Fuentes

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on…

— Philip Guedalla

Every business should have its biographer-not after its head is dead but to show that he's very much alive.

— Frank Pierson

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

— A. S. Byatt