Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I'm tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else's life offends my vanity.
I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.
For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.
My biographers... would like to have my time at the court almost complete before they finish the book. We decided... to flip the order.
Choose an author as you choose a friend.
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.
My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.
You do not give a great biographer a timetable. You let them do their work and, in due course, publish it.