Biographical Criticism Quotes

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

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

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

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

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

I had lost faith in biography.

I read a lot of biographies, and so much is just so boring or so, like, 'Why did you say that?'

Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.