Biographies Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

One posthumous measure of a person's life is how often you imagine his impossible return to deal with some event he never lived to…

— Paul Di Filippo

“A man should be so much greater than any material failure that can come to him that it would scarcely be mentioned in his…

— Orison Swett Marden

“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

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

— V. S. Naipaul

[On writing biography:] ... every human life is at once so complex and so simple, so perplexing and so clear, so superficial and so…

— Iris Origo

“To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant…

— Susan Sontag

“At Times, even he admitted that he'd been more an observer of the world than a participant in it, and in moments of painful…

— Nicholas Sparks

“Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an…

— Marcus Aurelius

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

— Thomas Carlyle

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect…

— Goldwin Smith

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