Jean Fritz

As a biographer, I try to uncover the adventures and personalities behind each character I research. Once my character and I have reached an understanding, then I begin the detective work reading old books, old letters, old newspapers, and visiting the places where my subject lived. Often I turn up surprises, and of course, I pass them on.

American Writer

A. N. Wilson

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

English Writer

Kitty Kelley

The authorized biographers - the ones hand-picked to write the sanitized version of a subject's life - sit up front with the swells while the unauthorized biographer who writes without access or approval gets elbowed to the back of the bus.

American Journalist

Virginia Woolf

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

British Author

Nigel Hamilton

For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.

Michelle Dean

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

Paul Theroux

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

American Novelist

Stacy Schiff

Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.

American Author

Leon Edel

The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

American Critic

Michael Korda

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.

English Novelist

A biographer tells a person's life story, with details about their experiences, accomplishments, and character.

Life Narrator

Unlike a novelist, a biographer writes true accounts of real people's lives, not fictional stories.

Nonfiction Focus

Biographers often spend considerable time researching and interviewing to understand the subject deeply.

In-Depth Research

 as an amicable psychopath. But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery. According to his biographer, "He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world."

Paul Bloom: The origins...

 But thanks to Franklin's biographers, who investigated her life and interviewed many people close to her, we now know that that account is far from true, and her scientific contributions have been vastly underplayed. Let's hear the real story.

Rosalind Franklin: DNA's...

 kind of gives you an image of slavery that we don't think about after his death the realities of Washington's life become obscured by folklore legend replaces fact and countless biographers seek to romanticize his life and