I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
Biography Quotes
Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
On biography: It is rarely well executed. They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.
I said, in writing a life, a man’s peculiarities should be mentioned, because they mark his character. Johnson: “Sir, there is no doubt as to peculiarities: the question is, whether a man’s vices should be mentioned; for instance, whether it should be mentioned that Addison and Parnell drank too freely: for people will probably more […]
Biography is the only true history.
That’s another of the problems with biography and autobiography. It can’t be managed except by casting one person as the star of the drama, and arranging everybody else as supporting players.
This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as long. What is he whom I never think of? Whilst in every solitude are those who succor our genius and stimulate us in wonderful manners. There is a […]
We arrive, then, at Johnson, the most tragic of all our major literary figures, a great writer whose still living writings are always ignored, a great honest man who will remain forever a figure of half fun because of the leechlike adoration of the greatest and most ridiculous of all biographers. For it is impossible […]
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot”, or “That Claudius”, or “Claudius the Stammerer”, or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius”, […]
The course of life is unpredictable… no one can write his autobiography in advance.
