What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink.

After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier spiced with expensive names.

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

How inexpressibly comfortable to know our fellow-creature; to see into him, understand his goings-forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eaten and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

No one had written a good long life of Schubert. He had lived long in music and short in life.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man-the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Every great man has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography