Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) British Novelist, Essayist, Biographer
Of all studies, the most delightful and useful is biography.—The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them.—No history was ever true; but lives which I have read, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, the utility of truth.
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) English Writer, Poet
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
—Simone Weil (1909–1943) French Philosopher, Political Activist
One anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
—Rebecca West (1892–1983) English Author, Journalist, Literary Critic
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
Memoirs are the backstairs of history.
—George Meredith (1828–1909) British Novelist, Poet, Critic
Now the Poet cannot die, nor leave his music as of old, but round him ere he scarce be cold begins the scandal and the cry.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) British Poet
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
Most biographies are of little worth.—They are panegyrics, not lives.—The object is, not to let down the hero; and consequently what is most human, most genuine, most characteristic in his history, is excluded.—No department of literature is so false as biography.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
Anyone who profits from the experience of others probably writes biographies.
—Franklin P. Jones
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
—Rebecca West (1892–1983) English Author, Journalist, Literary Critic
No matter how brilliant you are, if your style is too intense, most people will dismiss you.
—Marty Nemko (b.1950) American Career Coach
The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of his victim’s check-books.
—Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) American Neurologist, Writer
Those only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination, and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
History can be frmed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say… “Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic
My advice is to consult the lives of other men, as one would a looking-glass, and from thence fetch examples for imitation.
—Terence (c.195–159 BCE) Roman Comic Dramatist
A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967) French Novelist, Biographer
A life that is worth writing at all, is worth writing minutely and truthfully.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) American Poet, Educator, Academic
I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American Short-Story Writer, Novelist
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
—George Steiner (1929–2020) American Critic, Scholar
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood.
—Plutarch (c.46–c.120 CE) Greek Biographer, Philosopher
Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study.—Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.
—Horace Mann (1796–1859) American Educator, Politician, Educationalist
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish Critic, Journalist, Philosopher
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
—Robert Penn Warren (1905–89) American Poet, Novelist, Literary Critic
Great men have often the shortest biographies.—Their real life is in their books or deeds.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
There ain’t nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.
—Will Rogers (1879–1935) American Actor, Rancher, Humorist
There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.
—Unknown
Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
The poor dear dead have been laid out in vain; tumed into cash, they are laid out again.
—Thomas Hood (1799–1845) English Poet, Humorist