Who said “The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and…”?

“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.”

“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”

“Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.”

“Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.”

“There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.”

“Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.”

“Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.”

“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”

“To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless.”

“Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.”

“The age of the book is almost gone.”