“Biography: Respectable pornography, thanks to which the reader can become a peeping tom on the life of a famous person.
Biography has increasingly replaced the novel as the most popular form of serious reading. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel provided the reader with a reflection of him or herself, today the biography encourages the gratuitous pleasures and self-delusion of voyeurism.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Mark's Text Terminal 