Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.