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
Great men have often the shortest biographies.—Their real life is in their books or deeds.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
—George Steiner (1929–2020) American Critic, Scholar
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
Memoirs are the backstairs of history.
—George Meredith (1828–1909) British Novelist, Poet, Critic
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
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic
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
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
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
A life that is worth writing at all, is worth writing minutely and truthfully.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) American Poet, Educator, Academic
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
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
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
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
No matter how brilliant you are, if your style is too intense, most people will dismiss you.
—Marty Nemko (b.1950) American Career Coach
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
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
There ain’t nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.
—Will Rogers (1879–1935) American Actor, Rancher, Humorist
Anyone who profits from the experience of others probably writes biographies.
—Franklin P. Jones
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
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