Biographers Quotes

I was a biographer of MacArthur and Eisenhower. Eisenhower was smarter. MacArthur was more glib. When MacArthur had a problem, he turned it over to Eisenhower.

Although some Clinton biographers have been quick to label Alinsky a communist, he maintained that he never joined the Communist Party.

I like people like Andre Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Willa Cather, Robert Graves, Erik Erikson, and Francis Steegmuller.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

If we believe that he [Jesus Christ]really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the New Testament]father upon him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor.

Since 1966, hundreds of books have been published that follow murderers along their paths of destruction. Every serial killer, it seems, now has a biographer or two.

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.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

I have never known a great deal about any of the historical figures I have written about until I actually started researching the book. If I knew a great deal about the person, I would not have been interested in writing the book.

The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings.

His Cheek is his Biographer- As long as he can blush.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

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

After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier spiced with expensive names.

There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.

Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him.

There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers.

biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.