Humphrey Carpenter

“He came to believe that the crime of the artist is that he has a métier, a secret, an inside track to knowledge that is denied to other people.”

“Biography is a region bordered on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.”

“I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives your business: you lose the scent of your own.”

“It is, after all, the biographer's task to wrestle with his subject, and the result of the contest is not a foregone conclusion.”