Biographers Quotes - Page 2

• History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.

  David McCullough

  People, Flavor, Tables

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• 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

  Cynical, Said

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• 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

  Jesus, Father, Believe

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• 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

  Book, People, Literature

  Cynthia Ozick (1966). “Trust”

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• The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.

  Dan Barber

  Reading

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• 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

  People, Criticism, Talent

  Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton Lecture 1 (1811 - 1812)

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• I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

  Ron Chernow

  Littles, Hyperbole, I Can

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• 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

  Names, Giving, Anecdotes

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• Linda Tripp has shown that a true friend is an archivist, a biographer.

  Mary Schmich

  True Friend, Archivists, True Friend Is

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

  Clive James

  Hindsight, Inevitable, Belittle

  Clive James (2008). “Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts”, p.180, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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

  Girlfriend, Powerful, Stories

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• This is a glorious biography ... The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on this scale ... Lee the biographer pursues her subject down every winding corridor, into every hidden passage and dark corner ... Her critical exploration of Edith Whartons work is dazzlingly assured ... A feat of exhaustive research, and finely tuned to Whartons creative achievement at the same time ... [Wharton] could scarcely have failed to be impressed by ... its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception.

  Mark Bostridge

  Dark, Achievement, Creative

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• The biographer who writes the life of his subjects self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

  Leon Edel

  Writing, Self, House

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• Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him (i.e. Jesus) by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Jesus, Ignorance

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• The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.

  Jane Austen

  Love, Enthusiasm, Mansfield Park

  Jane Austen (2006). “8 Books in 1: Jane Austen's Complete Novels. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Lady Susan, and Love an”, p.360, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

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• "I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Writing, Successful, Unhappy

  Source: www.oxfordjournals.org

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• 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

  Father, Son, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• And she [Eleanor Roosevelt]loves being a star. And she loves being a teacher and a leader and a mentor and a big friend. Also, she's tall. She's one of the tallest girls in the school. And she's an athlete. And she writes many years later, at the end of her life, she writes that the happiest day, the happiest single day of her life was the day that she made the first team at field hockey. And I have to say, as a biographer, that's the most important fact. I

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Girl, Teacher, Stars

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• 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

  Giving, Creative, Add

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.232, OUP Oxford

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• One of the things for me, as a biographer, that is so significant is for Eleanor Roosevelt - the child who never had a home of her own, who lives in her grandmother's home and then goes to school and then gets married and lives in her mother-in-law's homes, and then in public housing (like the White House and the State House) - housing becomes for Eleanor Roosevelt the most important issue.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Mother, Children, Home

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• 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

  Skills, Years, People

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.

  Hilary Mantel

  Moving, People, Novelists

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• 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

  Omission, Path, Pitfalls

  "The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll". Book by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, 1898.

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• Every business should have its biographer-not after its head is dead but to show that he's very much alive.

  Frank Pierson

  Business, Should Have, Alive

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• 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

  Animal, Past, People

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