Behind Quote by Michael Korda

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

— Ron Chernow

My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to…

— William Styron

To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a…

— Nancy Milford

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

— Clive James

The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.

— Russell Baker

Perhaps the best thing about biographies is that they enable us to slip the strictures of time and provide a bracing corrective to our…

— Eric Metaxas

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

— Antonia Fraser

Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the…

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the…

— Colum McCann

For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be…

— Hilary Mantel

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the…

— Barbara Tuchman

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

— Carter G. Woodson