Biographers Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Artistic, Strikes, Autobiography

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

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Alive, Want, Knows

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• Boswell is the first of biographers.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Firsts

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• [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

  Secret, Boards, Agents

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