Biographers Quotes
The best sayings about Biographers that you can share on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and other social networks!
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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.
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Every child has the capacity to be everything.
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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.
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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.
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My biographer said that my parties reminded them of a vicarage tea party, with sex thrown in.
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The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare 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.
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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.
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The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.
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The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.
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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.
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What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
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There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Boswell is the first of biographers.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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