"To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact,…"

"To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but also the stamina of a horse. Virginia Woolf, however, called it "donkeywork" -for who but a domesticated ass would harness herself to what is recoverable of the past and call it A Life? Isn't there something curious, not to say questionable, about this appetite for other people's mail, called Letters? What does it mean to be mulish in porsuit of someone else's life, to be charmed, beguiled, even by the past, if not held fast to it? It isn't true that it provides insulation from the present. On the contrary, it impinges upon it, for while it is from the terrain of my own life that I work mining hers, biography is the true story of someone else's life, not my own."

- Nancy Milford, from her article in the August 2001 issue of Vanity Fair, "The Belle of Bohemia," concerning her writing the biography of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.