You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.
I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
I write from seven to about noon. I used to try to write longer, but I read and I found that I was always getting myself tired by working in the afternoon and then I was just throwing out what I wrote in the afternoon, so writing then was counterproductive.
I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
If things are going well, if the writing's coming along, I jump out of bed happy. And if the previous day has been bad, I get out of bed disgruntled.
Nobody believes this, but I write very fast.
I used to work very long hours. Then I started to realize that the stuff that I was writing in the late afternoons, I was generally throwing out. So I quit earlier than I used to.
