What is biography?

In favor

Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
-- José Ortega Y Gasset
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

Biographers, like actors, have to think their way into other people’s
minds and allow their own to be partially invaded by their subject’s.
-- Roger Berthoud

Then you take it all -- the chronology, the letters, the interviews, your
own knowledge, the newspaper cuttings, the history books, the diary,
the thousand hours of contemplation, and you try to make a whole of it,
not a chronicle but a drama, with a beginning and an end, the whole
being given form and integrity because a man moves through it from
birth to death, through all the beauty and terror of human life.
-- Alan Paton, on completing a biography.

The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent
and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t
discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life
that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless
happenings and gossip.
-- Leon Edel

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.
-- Virginia Woolf

[The biographer] must be as ruthless as a board meeting smelling out
embezzlement, as suspicious as a secret agent riding the Simplon-Orient
Express, as cold-eyed as a pawnbroker viewing a leaky concertina.
-- Paul Murray Kendall

Against

[Biography is] voyeurism embellished with footnotes.
-- Robert Skidelsky

Lincoln isn’t a man with ingrown toenails, he’s an idea.
-- Mario Cuomo, on a biography of Lincoln.

It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life
and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist
lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench
while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved
censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his
breast. He asks himself: 'What is he thinking?' and he knows nothing.
-- Andre Maurois

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history,
on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by
tedium.
-- Philip Guedalla

Let us have our heroes. Let us continue to believe that some have been
truly great; that it lies within human ability to overcome temptations
and trials; that it is sublime to suffer and be strong. Petty biographers
with inferior souls and jealous hearts would rob us of these happy privileges.
Sensationalism is alright for yellow journalism, but in biography we wish
to see our famous men and women as they were and feel the power of the
strength and beauty of their lives. Down with the debunking biographers.
-- Lyndon Johnson

The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures
but the story of his style.
-- Vladimir Nabokov

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes
painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business.
The greater the genius of the personage, the greater the profit.
--George Grosz

Resource: http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/biography/index.htm