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The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

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.

I love biographies. I'm especially into stuff about Hollywood in the '40s and '50s. I find it fascinating and terrifying.

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

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

I like to write stories that read like historical fiction about great, world-changing events through the lens of a flawed protagonist.

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

A lot of banging in the head has built up over the decades, and for my own sanity, I needed to write. I wanted to see if I could tell an honest, organic story about characters that interest me.

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.