...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.

Something I eventually learned: Prince's top girlfriend was always in Minneapolis. When you came to Minneapolis, you were the girl on her way in. When you left Minneapolis, you were the girl on her way out. This would have been a valuable piece of information for me to keep in my own hip pocket.

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

July 7, 1986: Montreux It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized that I enjoy to read (and have learned many things from) the biographies of artists whom I admire. It is probably my main source of education. In the beginning of my “career” (what an awful word) I was misled by a teacher who thought the things I was writing to be pretentious and self important. Years later, when I read those things I wrote in 1978, it didn’t seem so pretentious for almost everything I wrote about “wanting to do,” I actually did in the four or five years that followed.

When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

Each second of every time has its own story and history to be filed.

Bottom line: you never ever saw him looking wrong. Knowing this, I felt a cold shiver down my spine when I read in the Minneapolis StarTribune that when his body was found in the elevator at Paisley Park, "Prince was wearing a black shirt and pants - both were on backward - and his socks were inside out."This made no sense to me. The sheer irony of it broke my heart all over again.

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

Anyone who has lived a full life has something fascinating to share with the world.

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those.

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.

I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.

Tell them what you do, and if they want to know more, they’ll ask.