Biographers Quotes - Page 4

• The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Life, Work, Firsts

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• The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

  John Dos Passos

  Book, Writing, Reality

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.

  William Styron

  Thinking, Would Be, Dirt

  "A Conversation with William Styron". Interview with Sheldon Hackney, www.neh.gov. May/June 1997.

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• Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Eye, Blue, Together

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1998). “Sight-readings: American Fictions”, Random House Incorporated

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• [The biographer] must be as ruthless as a board meeting smelling out embezzlement, as suspicious as a secret agent riding the Simplon-Orient Express, as cold-eyed as a pawnbroker viewing a leaky concertina.

  Paul Murray Kendall

  Secret, Boards, Agents

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