I'm very old-fashioned - I don't operate with an agenda. If you're a biographer, you want to be passionate about what you're doing but dispassionate about how you do it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.
I consider myself a writer who happens to write about history, rather than a historian. I was an English major in college. What I've learned about history is in the field, so to speak. Going into the archives and working with it directly.
Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
I'm a writer, not an activist. My job is to analyse things, to think them through and examine them.
You do not give a great biographer a timetable. You let them do their work and, in due course, publish it.
Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
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 find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.
I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.
No opposing quotes found.