Quotes about Biography

“Biography is a higher gossip.”

“Memoirs are the backstairs of history.”

“Biography is one of the new terrors of death.”

“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.”

“There is properly no history; only biography.”

“Biography should be written by an acute enemy.”

“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”

“When my journal appears, many statues must come down.”

“Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.”

“The facts of a person's life will, like murder, come out.”

“A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.”

“An autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.”

“The surrounding that householders crave are glorified autobiographies.”

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

“Anyone who profits from the experience of others probably writes biographies.”

“Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”

“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”

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

“Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.”

“The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.”

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

“Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.”

“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

“For what is a poem, but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding. It is the deepest part of autobiography.”

“Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.”

“The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of his victim's check-books.”

“Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.”

“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”

“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.”

“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.”