I read more books for research purposes, whether it's a fictionalized biography of Johannes Gutenberg or a stack of urban fantasies.
Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic...
In my downtime, you'll mostly find me curled up with a book. I love reading biographies. My favourites are those of Dalai Lama, Osama Bin Laden, and Einstein.
Gil: She's right, I recently read a two-volume biography of Rodin, and Rose was the wife, Camille the mistress.
I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.
I think that I'm busy in the present, and I don't want to go back. Well, there's been an unauthorized biography, and you can't stop them. It didn't worry me.
I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.
What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.
Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.
P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.
I don’t read biographies for moral instruction, or for a history lesson. I want to know what people are saying about me.
I stayed up all night making love—to myself. That reminds me, I need to buy some more Jell-O and political biographies.
Raised in a completely nonreligious family, never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.
When I was growing up, I read Britney Spears' and Mariah Carey's biographies. I just wanted to see how they did it because I was so eager to get into the biz.
I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer's view is always something to keep in mind.
I can't say I wasn't warned. Alarms started clanging the day I signed to write 'His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra' (Bantam Books, 1986).
At the Sex Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, they were a phenomenal help, too. We went out there for a few days, and they gave us access to materials. And the biographies, there are four or five, ranging from very poor to excellent.
Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
