Famous quotes containing the word biographer:
“It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: What is he thinking? and he knows nothing.”
—Andre Maurois (18851967)
“Biography, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtueone given and received in entire disinterestednesssince neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, not the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)
“The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of his victims cheque-books.”
—Silas Weir Mitchell (18291914)