Biographers Quote by Marian Seldes

“A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers.”

— Macaulay

Let us have our heroes. Let us continue to believe that some have been truly great; that it lies within human ability to overcome…

— Lyndon Baines Johnson

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

“Margaret Lea.” “The biographer.”

— Diane Setterfield

“There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully's…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius,…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and…

— Norman MacCaig

“For whatever the era, nationality, gender and genre; whether realistic, traditional, fabulist, historical, fantasist, minimalist, crossover, the writer worthy of the literary arts and…

— Gregorio C. Brillantes

The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.

— Stacy Schiff

while it is certainly the biographer's business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be…

— Iris Origo

The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as…

— Alan Bennett