Biographical Analysis Quotes

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

You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

Political history is not the only way to approach historical figures.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.

The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It's useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It allows an opportunity to make some real assessments and judgments about personalities and characters.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

We try to find the information, the clues, to unlock the play or the story or our characters, especially when they're based on real people that live and breathe.

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.