Arthur Balfour Quotes

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

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!

I wouldn't want to write a biography of anyone. I'd feel too inhibited by the facts and too much pressure to do the subject's life justice.

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 is properly no history; only biography.

Biography is the best history.

The historian must walk a fine line between scientific detachment and humanistic engagement.

I've always been of the party that rubbished the idea of a definitive account of somebody's life.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

I've always liked the idea of memoirs, going into someone else's life, going through someone else's day and getting out of your own head.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

I will leave no memoirs.

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

I would like to continue to tell stories of what I did in a biographical way, so I will continue to write.

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

I had lost faith in biography.

In writing non-fiction about people who are living, you are always walking a fine line, carrying a burden to be fair that, in my opinion, should always be there.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.