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.
Serious biographies need to have a historical base in facts.
With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.
I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, 'Twilight,' also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families - real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.
The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.
I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.
My reading is always about musical biographies. I have an innate interest and passion for that.
As an eight-year-old, I would listen to stories and biographies of Charles Darwin and Galileo. I also went to wonderful schools and had great teachers who inspired me.
On the other hand, when I give it closer thought, I realize I'm not enough of a dictator to conduct an orchestra because it requires a pretty awful person. When you read these biographies of famous conductors, they are all awful people who fail in their private relationships.
There was a time when Stefan Zweig was the most widely read author in the world. He was lionized everywhere, translated into every language. For the first four decades of the 20th century, his novellas and biographies were devoured by rich and poor, young and old, well read or less so.
I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I'm reading biographies of Mahler.
For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.
I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
Remember the movie 'The Matrix,' where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won't always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the faces of the people we talk to, and we will see subtitles if they speak a foreign language.
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
I like reading biographies because most of them are slightly similar, and it's voyeuristic, looking into someone's life.
I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.
I've always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.
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.
I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.
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.
Women inspire me... so I enjoy women's stories and biographies. I am interested in all women.
I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.
Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all.
My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug 'Vanity Fair.' You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.
Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!
