Biographer Quotes

• Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.

  

  Elena Ferrante
  • Truth
  • Energy
  • Reporter

• To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse.

  

  Nancy Milford
  • Endeavor
  • Tact
  • Biographer

• One of the things for me, as a biographer, that is so significant is for Eleanor Roosevelt - the child who never had a home of her own, who lives in her grandmother's home and then goes to school and then gets married and lives in her mother-in-law's homes, and then in public housing (like the White House and the State House) - housing becomes for Eleanor Roosevelt the most important issue.

  

  Blanche Wiesen Cook
  • School
  • Child
  • Significant

• And she Eleanor Roosevelt loves being a star. And she loves being a teacher and a leader and a mentor and a big friend. Also, she's tall. She's one of the tallest girls in the school. And she's an athlete. And she writes many years later, at the end of her life, she writes that the happiest day, the happiest single day of her life was the day that she made the first team at field hockey. And I have to say, as a biographer, that's the most important fact.

  

  Blanche Wiesen Cook
  • Friend
  • Teacher
  • Leader

• Ronald Reagan's biographer wrote of the former president's final days: "for all the intimate familiarity of that face and body, I did not feel his presence beside me-only his absence."

  

  Edwin Morris
  • Presence
  • Wrote
  • Familiarity