A Quote by Doris Kearns Goodwin
I write about presidents. That means I write about guys - so far. I'm interested in the people closest to them, the people they love and the people they've lost... I don't want to limit it to what they did in the office, but what happens at home and in their interactions with other people.
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I tend not to meet the people I write about because I'm not really interested in the people I write about as people. I don't want to know about their family life. I don't want to know about their bad habits or their good deeds. I'm interested in their work.
People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.
I am interested in people, and I am interested enough in people that I want to be friends with a lot of people and know about their lives. So I'm not a hermit. I'm also interested in writing about other things. It goes on and on. I sometimes wish that I had a different personality. But then I would write different types of books.
Largely I write from life. ... I write from what happens to me. Mostly about love. People notice the other stuff more but I write mostly about love.
I love films that show people in a way that's so real it's almost unsettling, and that's what really inspires me because I write about people. I write about people that I know, so I want to portray them and portray myself in a way that is unapologetic.
I just love to play rock and roll. I love to write songs all the time
about what's up on these streets. I write songs about people getting killed; I write songs about people getting beaten up; I write songsabout people getting taken to jail by the police; and I also write songs about love and happiness.
I don't write about love because it makes for easy, passive heroes. I write about how love makes my characters more autonomous, more self-possessed, more opinionated and powerful. I write about characters who pursue relationships that make them the people they want to become. I write about love as a superpower.
I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.
I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand people read, or just privileged people read. I want to write a book whose emotional truth people can understand. For me, that's what it's about.
I think that most people who write about music just want to fill some paper. They're not really interested in getting to the heart of something. Otherwise, they wouldn't write what they write.
It is truly excellent to have someone believe in you and your ability to write. But I think it is just as helpful to have people who don't believe in you, people who mock you, people who doubt you, people who enrage you. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of this type of person in the world ... write for yourself. Write for the story. And write, also, for all of the people who doubt you. Write for all those people who are not brave enough to do this grand and wondrous thing themselves. Let them motivate you.
I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
People learn a lot about what they think they know about other people from what they see in the media. If they see certain types of images reproduced over and over again for other groups that limit them to narrow types of roles and portrayals, they start to take those prejudices into their interactions with those people in real society, and that creates all kinds of discriminatory problems.
For better or worse, a lot of people's images are based on the first things that are written about them. You can't control what people write about you, so - good or bad - I have never lost sleep about it.
I don't write about sex because it's not really my subject. I love it when other people write about it, but it's not my subject, and I don't want anyone I've had sex with to write about it. Plus, you're in front of an audience, and they picture wherever you're writing about. I'm 52; no one in the audience wants to picture that.
I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much.
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