Biographers Quotes

“I have often found it difficult to explain myself to myself, and I do not often try.”
― Ida Tarbell

“It is part of the received doctrine of modern biography that all characters are Flawed, and as a Christian priest I am quite ready to agree, but the Flaws the biographers exhibited usually meant that the person under discussion had not seen eye to eye with the biographer on matters of politics, or social betterment, or something impersonal.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“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, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

“For the biographer, the final clue to character lies in the yet unread - the scribbled note, the diary page, a notation in the margin of a draft - until the day when even the most devoted portraitist of the dead says, "Enough!" Working in the service of the dead, biographers quit their labors only when the sole remaining task is the impossible - resurrection.”
― Laura Furman, The Mother Who Stayed: Stories

“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.”
― David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie

“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.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.”
― Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

“Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods, who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No!”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Most biographies and autobiographies are each merely a slightly different packaging of the well-known fact that success rarely comes quickly or easily.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Each age wants to see its heroes in its own image, in ways that reflect the pieties and sentiments of its day.”
― Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography