I can’t write a line without music – it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates. – Stacy Schiff
Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We’re meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional. – Stacy Schiff
For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier. – Stacy Schiff
Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented. – Stacy Schiff
Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics, not a matter of love. – Stacy Schiff
What we know about Cleopatra’s looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority. – Stacy Schiff
I wouldn’t dare to speculate as to Cleopatra’s falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that. – Stacy Schiff
Recently a study proved that working from a larger, less cluttered computer screen increases concentration. I could have told them that. And yes, I write first drafts with a mechanical pencil and a yellow legal pad. There’s good reason for this primitive behavior: I am a crackerjack typist. My hand moves far more quickly than my brain. – Stacy Schiff
Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater. – Stacy Schiff
By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature. – Stacy Schiff
A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which – if she wasn’t smart enough to camouflage herself – she generally paid the price. – Stacy Schiff
I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It’s a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good 150 miles against the current, you can’t take a ship. – Stacy Schiff
Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. ‘To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way,’ is Richard Holmes’s version. – Stacy Schiff
Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word. – Stacy Schiff
You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra’s day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with. – Stacy Schiff
Of course, women have long exercised influence behind the scenes. A few thousand years ago this drove Aristotle to distraction: ‘What difference does it make whether women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.’ – Stacy Schiff
In ‘Plutarch,’ her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy. – Stacy Schiff
We’re talking about, essentially, the Roman historians, who wrote Cleopatra into the story mostly so that they could talk about the rise of Rome. And that is one of the problems, of course, in recounting her life. She’s only ever apparent to us when there is a Roman in the room, or when her story intersects with the rise of Rome. – Stacy Schiff
My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents! – Stacy Schiff
Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful? – Stacy Schiff
The desk thing is a problem for me. The ideal one would be vast and perfectly clear. Yet the bane of the biographical existence is paper; if you’re ‘an artist under oath’ you’re writing from a mountain of documentation. – Stacy Schiff
For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman’s intelligence was a man’s deception. – Stacy Schiff
I’m a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change. – Stacy Schiff
Reality does not easily give up meaning; it’s the biographer’s job to clobber it into submission. You’re meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots. – Stacy Schiff
We don’t know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day. – Stacy Schiff
