Biographical Perspective Quotes

History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale.

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

Boswell is the first of biographers.

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.

Alfred Hitchcock, Isaac Newton, Elvis Presley, Captain Bligh, they're heroic or pathetic depending on which book you buy.

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

I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.

I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer's view is always something to keep in mind.

Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.