“I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.”
Jonathan Coe
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography”
Oscar Wilde
“The way we should take life is to ensure that if a biography is ever written about us, that it is a bloody good read.”
Nick Kinsella
“[Well, we'll tackle that a bit later. Back to biography:] The only way of writing any kind of study, say the Thomas More one, is to so fully enter his sensibility that you become a part of it, and he becomes a part of you, ... In that process you begin to see the heart of his design. It would be foolish and unproductive to see it as a totally alien system of belief. Far better to enter it in a spirit of communion.”
Peter Ackroyd
“Biography tends to tilt history, because every person you are writing about becomes larger than life.”
Douglas Brinkley
“There is properly no history; only biography”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Biography lends to death a new terror.”
