No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'
In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.
Lyndon Johnson (with Abraham Lincoln close behind). Johnson was able to get things done, to read other people, and to adjust his own approach accordingly. One of the reasons he has so fascinated biographer Robert Caro over the years is Johnson's consummate skill in acquiring and using influence.
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.
There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.
And she [Eleanor Roosevelt]loves being a star. And she loves being a teacher and a leader and a mentor and a big friend. Also, she's tall. She's one of the tallest girls in the school. And she's an athlete. And she writes many years later, at the end of her life, she writes that the happiest day, the happiest single day of her life was the day that she made the first team at field hockey. And I have to say, as a biographer, that's the most important fact. I
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it's a good death. Make sure you're not picking someone who just declined.
His Cheek is his Biographer- As long as he can blush.
To the biographer all lives bar none are dramatic constructions.
