Biographers Quote by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

“It seems - and who so astonished as they? - that they had held back material facts; that they were guilty of both suppressio…

— Rudyard Kipling

“It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory. This attitude is excused with the reproach that from…

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Russell Baker

“These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults. Which…

— Jonathan Swift

“Quality and consistency of conjecture are one good measure of the ambition and the inwardness of any literary biography. The biographer is master of…

— Geoffrey Wall

“The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid…

— Thomas Bernhard

“The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's…

— A.S. Byatt

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Clive James

“He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in…

— Voltaire

The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance;…

— C. V. Wedgwood

“There is such a weight of history behind this that it makes Valerio feel weak. He has never experienced anything of the sort, and…

— Sahar Delijani