André Maurois

For more information on André Maurois, visit Britannica.com.

Maurois, André (pseud. of Émile Herzog) (1885-1967). The foremost popular biographer in France in the 20th c., his subjects include Shelley (1923), Disraeli (1927), Byron (1930), Turgenev (1931), Chateaubriand (1938), Proust (1949), George Sand (1952), Victor Hugo (1954), Madame de Lafayette (1961), and Balzac (1965). The popularity of his biographies undoubtedly owes much to the semifictional techniques of character-analysis and narration on which they are based. A devoted anglophile, Maurois also produced an Histoire d'Angleterre (1937), as well as two amusing novels which draw upon his experience with British troops during World War I and which established his literary reputation: Les Silences du colonel Bramble (1918) and its sequel, Les Discours du docteur O'Grady (1922).

[Nicholas Hewitt]

Quotes:

"Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul."

"Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form."

"If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain."

"A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection."

"The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life."

"Men and women are not born inconstant: they are made so by their early amorous experiences."

See more famous quotes by Andre Maurois