Biography

(212 votes)   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, Writer

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(146 votes)   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 Philosopher, Author

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(108 votes)   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 Writer

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(102 votes)   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
1898-1961, American Writer

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(96 votes)   Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.

Fawn M. Brodie
1915-1981, American Biographer

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(88 votes)   There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.

Will Rogers
1879-1935, American Humorist, Actor

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(66 votes)   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 Philosopher, Author

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(48 votes)   Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

Evelyn Waugh
1903-1966, British Novelist

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(46 votes)   History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Thomas Carlyle
1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author

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(44 votes)   Anyone who profits from the experience of others probably writes biographies.

Jones

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(39 votes)   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, British Author

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(37 votes)   Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset
1883-1955, Spanish Essayist, Philosopher

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(34 votes)   On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

Paul Murray Kendall

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(33 votes)   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, Physician, Writer, Poet

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(32 votes)   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

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