What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.

What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?

One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?

A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.