Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.
I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
When I'm traveling the world, I don't ever look anymore at the geography - just enough to catch galleries and paintings.
I want my books to last, to stand the test of time, and to do that I focus on the forces that shape the subject - the cultural and sociological geography - to capture them in a way that will explain them no matter what they are doing.
I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
I like geography. I like to know where places are.
For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.
If geography is prose, maps are iconography.
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.