Quotes About Biographers

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.

Authorised royal biographers are so straitjacketed, deferential, fawning, and unadventurous that they can only be after a knighthood. Or they're completely scurrilous and insolent, like Andrew Morton or Paul Burrell.

Of all Prince Philip's respected biographers, only Sarah Bradford is adamant that Philip has had affairs.

I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.

Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other's side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion.

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.

Biographers are notorious for falling in love with their subjects. It is the literary equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome,

Earlier generations of biographers had to rely on only a meager portion of his voluminous output.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

In my case, I belong to a group of aspiring and practicing biographers in Boston. We meet once a month for a coupla hours. It's become my lifeline - forgive the pun.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Though Morgan was a collector as indiscriminate as he was voracious ('a chequebook collector', one of his biographers, John Kennedy Winkler, has called him), he was able to create, by the sheer weight of his name, a valuable provenance of his own.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or at the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

Mary Jane Clairmont, the second wife of William Godwin, and Mary Shelley's stepmother, had the idea of bringing out French fairy tales for children in an attempt to make some much needed money for the family (she has not been given her due by biographers, in my view).

All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures — an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.

For many years, biographers and scholars, beginning with her great nephew James Austen-Leigh, presented her as a quiet, reserved, proper woman, but one has only to read her novels to realize that she was nothing so bland. Her genius, her craft, and her timeless prose are no secret, but thanks to Cassandra's scissors, most other aspects of her life will probably remain a mystery.

Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.

he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a 'degree bordering on disease'19. Any human contact was for him a source of the deepest discomfort.

Take it all in. Remember everything. " I assumed reporters and biographers would want lots of specific information when they wrote about the Great Expedition. The details would make good reading. The hot sun beating on our heads, the leaky boat, the lack of good supplies. The setup was perfect. Dad always said you couldn't do a job correctly without the proper tools. Well, I was going to do it with a whole boatload of improper equipment. He would be doubly amazed.

Thomas Paine, so celebrated and so despised as he traveled through the critical events of his time, has long appealed to biographers. Paine was present at the creation both of the United States and of the French Republic. His eloquence, in the pamphlet 'Common Sense,' propelled the American colonists toward independence.

maybe his libido was submerged in some sort of polymorphous love of nature, as some biographers have theorized about Thoreau.

Truman's diary entry of July 25 remains an inexplicable curiosity. Perhaps he felt sudden qualms, and soothed them with therapeutic delusions. He might have sensed that future historians and biographers were reading over his shoulder, and hoped to be commended as a man of delicate conscience. If so, the entry was a feckless gesture, serving only to leave the impression that the diary was not a faithful record of Truman's inner thoughts.

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.