Top 39 Quotes About Biographers
#1. The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. ==========
Anonymous
#2. Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.
Claire Tomalin
#3. Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's.
Milan Kundera
#4. The great biographers take excessive liberties in denigrating his person, and, in doing so, they make it difficult to comprehend him."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 17
Russel H.S. Stolfi
#5. How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.
Virginia Woolf
#6. All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.
Mark Twain
#7. In my case, I belong to a group of aspiring and practicing biographers in Boston. We meet once a month for a coupla hours. It's become my lifeline - forgive the pun.
Nigel Hamilton
#8. But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him.
Karen Russell
#9. After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier spiced with expensive names.
Louise Brooks
#10. Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those easy speeches that comfort cruel men.
Timothy Garton Ash
#11. Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him.
Joseph Addison
#12. Any good biography has to got to lead you to the work. Many biographers have started out in love with their subjects and ended up hating them.
D.T. Max
#13. Hypertext is an idea. The Internet is a medium. They grow up beside each other, they influence each other, and their evolving relationship will probably provide a great story for future biographers.
Mark Bernstein
#14. 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
#15. I belong to the Boston Biographers Group - and get my monthly 'fix' from them. Where else can I sit down for two hours with people who understand the challenge I face, daily, as a life-chronicler?
Nigel Hamilton
#16. Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other's side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion.
Janet Malcolm
#17. Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.
Amity Shlaes
#18. All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.
Gloria Steinem
#19. A. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.
Cynthia Ozick
#20. The ability of Isaacson to write books that capture an age as well as a man makes him one of our best and most important biographers. Steve Jobs shows Isaacson at his best." - Foreign
Walter Isaacson
#22. A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.
David Levering Lewis
#23. In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.
Miriam Makeba
#24. The intellectually-inclined biographers stray from the point that the message is directed through the spoken word at the broad masses and not writing to an inbred, self-adoring intellectual elite."
--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, pp. 30-31
Russel H.S. Stolfi
#25. I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.
Kyo Maclear
#26. Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
#27. Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.
A. N. Wilson
#29. Mary Jane Clairmont, the second wife of William Godwin, and Mary Shelley's stepmother, had the idea of bringing out French fairy tales for children in an attempt to make some much needed money for the family (she has not been given her due by biographers, in my view).
Marina Warner
#30. Although some Clinton biographers have been quick to label Alinsky a communist, he maintained that he never joined the Communist Party.
Bill Dedman
#31. If we could believe that Jesus ... countenanced the follies, falsehoods and charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, ... the conclusion would be irresistible ... that he was an imposter.
Thomas Jefferson
#32. 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 helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
Claire Tomalin
#33. Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#34. Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
Milan Kundera
#35. The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.
Dan Barber
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
