Biographers Quotes - Page 3

• 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

  Past, Two, Use

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• 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

  Men, Watches, Purpose

  Joseph Addison (1761). “The Freeholder: Or Political Essays”, p.209

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• every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hands, People, Soul

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.499, Wordsworth Editions

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• 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

  Hate, Biographies, Subjects

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Artistic, Strikes, Autobiography

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• 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

  Growing Up, Ideas, Stories

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• My biographer said that my parties reminded them of a vicarage tea party, with sex thrown in.

  Cynthia Payne

  Sex, Party, Tea

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• 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

  Feelings, President, Finals

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• Working in the service of the dead, biographers quit their labors only when the sole remaining task is the impossible- resurrection.

  Laura Furman

  Tasks, Impossible, Quitting

  Laura Furman (2011). “The Mother Who Stayed: Stories”, p.64, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Growing Up, Kids, Thinking

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• The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.

  Victoria Glendinning

  Facts, Critics, Novel

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• Boswell is the first of biographers.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Firsts

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• 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

  Hours, Sympathetic

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850). “Representative Men: Seven Lectures”, p.154

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• Man you can define; but the true essence of any man, say, for instance, of Abraham Lincoln, remains the endlessly elusive and mysterious object of the biographer's interest, of the historian's comments, of popular legend, and of patriotic devotion.

  Josiah Royce

  Patriotic, Men, Essence

  Josiah Royce (1952). “The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce; Edited, with an Introductory Essay, by Stuart Gerry Brown”

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• Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Alive, Want, Knows

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• 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

  Children, Italian, Years

  Anna Garlin Spencer (1908). “Woman's Share in Social Culture”

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• biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

  Erica Jong

  Art, Biographies, Collaborating

  Erica Jong (2013). “The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller”, p.65, Open Road Media

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• The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, were exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and virtue.

  Samuel Johnson

  Greatness, Men, Details

  Samuel Johnson (1840). “The Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson...”, p.260

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• 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

  Mirrors, Want, Matter

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• 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

  Drama, Passion, Men

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• In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it.

  Marian Seldes

  Book, Perfect, Shining

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• 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

  Problem, Poet, Lays

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4047, Delphi Classics

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• biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.

  Linda Simon

  Biographies, Autobiography, Written

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• 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

  Marriage, Sex, Thinking

  "Revenge of the pygmies" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. June 24, 2000.

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• His Cheek is his Biographer- As long as he can blush.

  Emily Dickinson

  Long, Cheeks

  Emily Dickinson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Emily Dickinson (Illustrated)”, p.1740, Delphi Classics

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