“Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a...” — A. S. Byatt Quote

“Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.”

“I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.”

“Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.”

“John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.”

“I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.”

“In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.”