biography quotes

How gently, wisely, and justly G MYoung deals with him. That is not the way to write biography.

- Dean Gooderham Acheson
Collected in David S McClellan and David C  Acheson (eds) Among Friends: Personal Letters of Dean Gooderham  Acheson (1980). OnYoung's biography Stanley Baldwin (1952).

It is unlikely that anyone will write his biography, but he will be enshrined in10,000 indexes.

- Henry Southworth Allen
  Of Brent Scowcroft, National Security Council adviser to George Bush. In the Washington Post, 3  Jan.

   Biography is now more or less a branch of psychiatry.

- CliveWilliam Aslet
  In Country Life,10 Nov, reviewing  Jonathan Dimbleby  The Prince of Wales:  A Biography (1994).

The art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about Maps, But Biography is about Chaps.

- Edmund Clerihew Bentley
  Biography for Beginners, introduction.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if theyare, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink.

- Catherine Shober ne  e Drinker Bowen
  In Publisher's Weekly, 24 Mar. Bowen's biographies were frequently partly fictionalized.

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

- Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
  Contarini Fleming, pt.1, ch.23.

There is properly no history; only biography.

- RalphWaldo Emerson
Essays: First Series,'History'.

   We have escapist fiction†why not escapist biography?

-John Kenneth Galbraith
  In the NewYork Times, 27  Jul.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life'it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

- (Henry) Graham Greene
A Sort of Life, preface.

   Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.

- Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd
  Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography &  Autobiography, 'The Case  against Biography'.

   Inthehistorian'sview biography isa kindoffrogspawn it takes ten thousand biographies to make one small history.

- Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd
  Works on Paper:The Craft of Biography &  Autobiography, 'The Case  against Biography'.

Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography.Boswell was one ofthesmallest menthat ever lived and he has beaten them all.

-1st Baron
  'Croker's new edition of  The Life of Samuel Johnson', in the Edinburgh Review, Sep.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

- Bernard Malamud
  Dubin's Lives.

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.

- C(harles) Wright Mills
  The Sociological Imagination, ch.1.

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.

- Harold Rosenberg
  'TheAmerican Action Painters', in Art News, no.51, Dec.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

- Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
Intentions,'The Critic as Artist'.