Biographers Quote by Nancy Milford

Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.

— Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into…

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Ron Chernow

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

— Ron Chernow

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know…

— John Keegan

Historians have become far too precious. Their work has become ever more specialised and, as they steadily lose the context of their studies, they…

— David Starkey

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

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is…

— Claire Tomalin

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

— Karl Kraus

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

— Russell Baker

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