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You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.

I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.

I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.

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.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom.

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

I hate biographies which say, I was called to such and such an office, and he offered me so and so, and I got so and so money. I find that very tedious. The best biographies are written by other people.