I'm also doing a special for Comedy Central called Autobiography. It's going to be a spoof of Biography.
I'm completely absorbed by Peter Guralnick's definitive, two-part biography of Elvis Presley: 'Last Train To Memphis' and 'Careless Love.' Meticulously researched, this is a compelling mix of history, myth-busting, and, of course, some timeless music.
The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.
I read more books for research purposes, whether it's a fictionalized biography of Johannes Gutenberg or a stack of urban fantasies.
Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
I had lost faith in biography.
Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
I just want everybody to know that I'm opposed to an unauthorized biography on anybody.
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom.
Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it's familiar stuff and has all been written about before.
I rely on my iPad for on-the-go entertainment. I stock it with TV shows, like 'Parks and Recreation' and the British version of 'The Office.' I'm reading a Charles Manson biography on it too, since I'm weirdly into true crime.
Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.
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'd read Stone Cold's biography about how he lived on, like, raw potatoes, and I thought, this is all part of it. This is what wrestlers do, and this is what I'm going to do.
When I'm dead, somebody can write my biography. I wrote a national hymn, an anthem, which I don't want to present to that country. But I have a deal with my wife - when I'm dead, she should offer it, because then I'm safe.
I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'
When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.
I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.
If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.
If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don't know what was going on in the person's mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
The only biography I read was about Al Bell, of Stax Records. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Al Bell.
John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.
A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.
My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.
I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.
I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?
Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.
The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.