I’m suspicious of the idea of categories in music and this idea of things being in boxes. To me, that seems unnatural. I write the music that somebody with my biography would write, and the thing that’s always driven me is an enthusiasm for the material. I sort of follow the notes to where they want to go.
In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction – in which I’ll include memoir, biography, and true crime – is that one relieves the other.
I just love biography, and I’m fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
I think I’ve had 16 books that purport to be a biography of me. I’ve never cooperated with someone.
What’s weird is that anybody can write anything, and once it goes online, it’s permanent. My very first biography on IMDb, which was written by a manager I had at the time, was not true.
I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I’m going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.
One day I’ll bring a biography of my life out and that will be the biggest joke I’ll ever tell.
The rumors of Frank Sinatra’s violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.
I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.
I became quite taken over by Johnson’s personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.
I loved Victoria Glendinning’s bio of Vita Sackville-West. I also loved Michael Holroyd’s immense biography of Lytton Strachey.
I’m not one of those people who writes a biography or tries to figure out what kind of ice cream the character liked when he was 10.
There’s no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress… It’s like a secret society up there.
John Kerry’s biography was central to his campaign.
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
What you seem to find when you get into this biography business is that people tend to have an image of themselves that they want to project, and they want to color statements by this image.
The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness.
If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.
Once you choose to run for president of the United States and succeed, your earlier life, your biography, is a major part of American history.
Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.
I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can’t interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they’re gone and people are more willing to talk about them.
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.
My first biography written in ’73 was not ‘Journey To The Moon.’ It was ‘Return To Earth.’ Because for me, that was the more difficult task – disappointment.
I had to do the book because there was an unauthorised biography which didn’t tell it like it was.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
I’m also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It’s going to be a spoof of Biography.
I just want everybody to know that I’m opposed to an unauthorized biography on anybody.
