I am a compulsive worker. But I'm also a compulsive relaxer.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

I like my subjects to be American, and not too dead, so I can interview people who knew them.

By the '40s, Sam Goldwyn is a very serious man. By the '50s, he's the dean of American producers. To the end, he was Hollywood's gray eminence.

I said, ‘There’s one idea I’ve been carrying in my hip pocket for 35 years. It’s Woodrow Wilson.’

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.