Top 66 Biographer Quotes
#1. Biographer diagnoses reaction to restriction as a tell of true character. Some use even prison as a time of reflection and planning. Others, like Churchill, quickly chafe at missing interaction and opportunity.
William Manchester
#2. On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
Paul Murray Kendall
#3. While it is certainly the biographer's business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be very meagre if these individual traits are not also seen as part of a universal drama - for each man's life is also the story of Everyman.
Iris Origo
#4. I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
Ron Chernow
#5. His biographer, Cornelius Nepos, a younger contemporary whom he knew personally, wrote that Atticus behaved so as to seem at one with the poorest and on a level with the powerful.
Anthony Everitt
#6. The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.
Jane Austen
#7. Jim Reston: And of course when that moment came
no words came to my mouth, and I shook his hand. Because if you've spent that long hating a man
in the end
a kind of relationship develops. An intimacy. Biographer and subject. Assassin and target.
Peter Morgan
#8. No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'
Stacy Schiff
#9. Every business should have its biographer-not after its head is dead but to show that he's very much alive.
Frank Pierson
#10. Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his top-10 friends!
Walter Kirn
#11. In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends ... Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.
Darryl Pinckney
#12. To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse.
Nancy Milford
#13. The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.
Stacy Schiff
#14. Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.
Paul Theroux
#15. Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it's a good death. Make sure you're not picking someone who just declined.
Hermione Lee
#16. Ray Bradbury published his first story 29 years before I was born. He established himself as an international writer long before I arrived. When my mom was nine months pregnant with me, my father read Bradbury aloud to her as I listened intently, in utero. And I later became his biographer.
Sam Weller
#17. Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer's view is always something to keep in mind.
Stacy Schiff
#19. Lyndon Johnson (with Abraham Lincoln close behind). Johnson was able to get things done, to read other people, and to adjust his own approach accordingly. One of the reasons he has so fascinated biographer Robert Caro over the years is Johnson's consummate skill in acquiring and using influence.
Jeffrey Pfeffer
#20. The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.
Thomas Mallon
#21. I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.
David Levering Lewis
#22. My biographer said that my parties reminded them of a vicarage tea party, with sex thrown in.
Cynthia Payne
#23. One of hardest for any historian or a biographer to do is to capture convincingly on paper something as ethereal as charisma. It's a relative term, and different generations define it differently.
Richard Norton Smith
#24. For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.
Nigel Hamilton
#25. Biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.
Linda Simon
#26. Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots.
Stacy Schiff
#27. The authorized biographers - the ones hand-picked to write the sanitized version of a subject's life - sit up front with the swells while the unauthorized biographer who writes without access or approval gets elbowed to the back of the bus.
Kitty Kelley
#28. Biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
Erica Jong
#29. Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.
Leon Edel
#30. TV was on Mr. Jobs's to-do list. "I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. "I finally cracked it." But then he died,
Anonymous
#31. The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.
Victoria Glendinning
#32. One biographer said Kennedy lived along the line where charm became power.
Scott Farris
#33. Since 1966, hundreds of books have been published that follow murderers along their paths of destruction. Every serial killer, it seems, now has a biographer or two.
Eric Schlosser
#34. [The biographer] must be as ruthless as a board meeting smelling out embezzlement, as suspicious as a secret agent riding the Simplon-Orient Express, as cold-eyed as a pawnbroker viewing a leaky concertina.
Paul Murray Kendall
#35. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, author of the monograph of which the following pages afford a translation, was born at Meeder, a small village in Saxe-Coburg, on February 22, 1749, seventeen months before the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose first biographer he became.
Johann Nikolaus Forkel
#36. Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Virginia Woolf
#37. I am the biographer of my own life. And no one can take that away from me.
Krista Ritchie
#38. My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
William Styron
#39. I am well aware that the path of the biographer is beset with pitfalls, and that, for him, suppressio veri is almost necessarily suggestio falsi - the least omission may distort the whole picture.
Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
#40. The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.
Dan Barber
#41. Wherever Gandhi went, he transformed situations and lives. As one friend and biographer wrote, He ... changed human beings by regarding them not as what they thought they were but as though they were what they wished to be, and as though the good in them was all of them
Benjamin Hoff
#42. To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.
Blake Bailey
#43. The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.
Russell Baker
#44. The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
Clive James
#45. To the biographer all lives bar none are dramatic constructions.
Katharine Anthony
#46. Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.
Rachel Holmes
#47. To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no Biographer -
Emily Dickinson
#48. And when her biographer says of an Italian woman poet, 'during some years her Muse was intermitted,' we do not wonder at the fact when he casually mentions her ten children.
Anna Garlin Spencer
#49. Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.
Stacy Schiff
#50. Ronald Reagan's biographer wrote of the former president's final days: "for all the intimate familiarity of that face and body, I did not feel his presence beside me-only his absence."
Edwin Morris
#51. 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 life ...
A.S. Byatt
#54. The biographer's real business - if it is not too arrogant to say so - is simply this: to bring the dead to life.
Iris Origo
#55. I'm very old-fashioned - I don't operate with an agenda. If you're a biographer, you want to be passionate about what you're doing but dispassionate about how you do it.
Richard Norton Smith
#56. Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.
Stacy Schiff
#57. The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.
Leon Edel
#58. There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
Orson Welles
#59. All of us are many different people over time. We have our childhood selves, people that we remember, but they're very different to our adult selves and the way that we create our own naratives is not that dissimilar, I think, to how a biographer structures their narrative of a life.
Rachel Holmes
#60. Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
Claire Tomalin
#61. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!
Virginia Woolf
#62. Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder.
Virginia Woolf
#63. I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas' gambling interests and criminal connections.
Roger Morris
#64. Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#65. Linda Tripp has shown that a true friend is an archivist, a biographer.
Mary Schmich
#66. Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'
Tom Paulin
