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" 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
Roommates
Music
Me
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" 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
Meaning
Words
Reality
" I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that. "
Stacy Schiff
Falling In Love
Love
Relationships
" No biographical subject is ever on hold with the orthodontist. If there's a dry spell, it's your job to curtail or eliminate it. "
Stacy Schiff
Your
Dry
Hold
" 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
Carry
Story
Mountain
" 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
Political
Politics
Power
" In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write an English that positively sings. "
Stacy Schiff
World
Class
Star
" The interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she is such a shape-shifter. I mean through history we've all molded her to our times and our places. So there's room for a movie for her, but I don't think it will hew to the book. "
Stacy Schiff
Think
History
Book
" 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
Long
Behind
Influence
" I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.' "
Stacy Schiff
New
Me
Said
" 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
Rich
Woman
Smart
" 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
Today
Power
History
" 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
Child
Change
Library
" 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
Yourself
Imagination
Tolerance
" The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. "
Stacy Schiff
She
Understands
Lives
" 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
Me
You
Writing
" 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
Reunion
Girl
Book
" 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
Intelligence
Women
Woman
" 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
Voice
Marriage
" 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
Women
Day
Education
" You ever try to leave New York? I did once. I lasted about a year. "
Stacy Schiff
Year
New York
You
" Have you ever been married? Had that thing of someone calling you by a name not your own? It's unsettling. It's like a fictitious person. "
Stacy Schiff
Name
Someone
You
" By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature. "
Stacy Schiff
Time
History
Recognition
" 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
Day
Dive
See
" I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched. "
Stacy Schiff
Book
Realize
Think
" No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did. "
Stacy Schiff
World
Wealth
Modern
" 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
Life
Rise
Rome
" I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before. "
Stacy Schiff
Great
Book
Education
" An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second. "
Stacy Schiff
Me
Interesting
Book
" How does a woman in authority convey that authority? Is it possible for a woman to rule without sounding shrill? Is it possible for a woman to manage without manipulating? All of these things seem to me to be very much at the fore today, and were no less the case 2,000 years ago. "
Stacy Schiff
Woman
Me
Authority
" For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view. "
Stacy Schiff
View
Me
Point Of View