Biographies Quote by Otto Penzler

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

— A. Scott Berg

The creative person should have no other biography than his works.

— B. Traven

[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

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

— Pamela Stephenson

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.

— Tom Stoppard

An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and…

— Jon Meacham

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of…

— Robert Gottlieb

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

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

I've published many biographies over the years and enjoyed working with writers on their research, discussing it, thinking about it and how it revealed…

— Victoria Wilson

The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record…

— Samuel Smiles