Quotessence
Home / Topics / Biographers Quotes

Biographers Quotes

Browse 83 quotes about Biographers.

Related topics

BiographiesIfsPeopleMenSubjectsHistorianThinking

Biographers Quotes

“The biographer is often asked at the conclusion of his project whether he has grown to like or dislike his subject. The answer of course is both. But the question is misplaced. This biographer's greatest fear was not that he might come to admire or disapprove of his subject, but that he might end up enervated by years of research into another man's life and times. That was, fortunately, never the case. The highest praise I can offer Andrew Carnegie is to profess that, after these many years of research and writing, I find him one of the most fascinating men I have encountered, a man who was many things in his long life, but never boring.”

BiographersAndrew CarnegieMisplaced Question
Book:Andrew Carnegie
Create image

“The seeds of our own destruction are often sown at birth or in childhood. We are too busy acquiring knowledge and living life to notice their presence. It is for our biographers, if we are of sufficient importance to have any, to highlight them to a post-mortem audience.”

BiographersCharacter FlawsAchilles HeelSelf Destructive BehaviorBiography Of Famous PeoplePost MortemFatal FlawSelf Destructive QuoteExposed SecretsSeeds Of Destruction
Author:Stewart Stafford
Create image

“If we believe that he [Jesus Christ]really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the New Testament]father upon him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor.”

IfsMindBelieveWould BeAgeFatherJesusSoundChristJesus ChristConclusionFollyLatterFalsehoodTestamentNew TestamentFanaticsIrresistibleBiographersSound Mind
Author:Thomas Jefferson
Create image

“The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.”

PeopleGivingWritingBookRealityAgeAbleClassGainsEntertainmentExcuseNovelistsHistorianImaginaryFactualBiographersVicarious
Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose
Create image

“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.”

MenWellsMadeFactsLyingEasyHalfLeaderHeroComfortSpeechClaimsMythPostsDictatorSpySubversiveHalf TruthBiographersElected Leaders
Book:Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name
Create image

“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.”

MenVirtueMinutesGreatnessProducePerformancesCastsDetailsPrivacyDaily LifeDisplayVulgarPrudenceIncidentsExteriorBiographers
Book:The Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson...
Create image

“Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”

ThinkingWorldReasonCertainHouseViewsSecretTakenMediumsBiographiesJewelryDrawersDumpedBiographersBurglars
Book:Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath And Ted Hughes
Create image

“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.”

ImportantBookFoundWishInterestPerfectSubjectsFiguresLoversEqualTheaterShiningFascinatingColleaguesVividPrivate LifeBiographersLovers And Friends
Author:Marian Seldes
Create image

“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.”

MenInterestObjectsEssenceRemainsIndividualityDevotionInstanceMysteriousPatrioticCommentHistorianLegendsAbrahamElusiveBiographers
Book:The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce; Edited, with an Introductory Essay, by Stuart Gerry Brown
Create image

“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.”

PeopleKindLife IsLeftChanceSubjectsTablesAwfulMannersUncertaintyFlavorDisturbedBiographersTable MannersHorsing Around
Author:David McCullough
Create image

“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”

WritingYearsFirstsMadeImportantEndsFactsBigsSchoolGirlStarsLove IsLeaderTeacherTeamFieldsAthleteTallHockeyMentorEleanorBeing A TeacherBiographersField Hockey
Author:Blanche Wiesen Cook
Create image

“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.”

ChildrenImportantStatesHomeSchoolLawMotherHouseWhiteIssuesMarriedSignificantGrandmotherWhite HouseHousingIn-lawsEleanorImportant IssuesMother In LawBiographersPublic Housing
Author:Blanche Wiesen Cook
Create image