The desk thing is a problem for me. The ideal one would be vast and perfectly clear. Yet the bane of the biographical existence is paper; if you're 'an artist under oath' you're writing from a mountain of documentation.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In some ways it's taken me decades to come clean and make honest work - and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.
I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.
I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire - Hopper, Sargent, Twain - and postcards from beloved bookstores where I've spent all my time and money - Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore.
I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.
Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.
I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
I would like to continue to tell stories of what I did in a biographical way, so I will continue to write.
For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.