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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
No one sits on the stoop when she’s a kid and thinks, ‘I want to be a biographer when I grow up.’ Stacy Schiff Read Quote
From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra’s irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will – really a great political genius, in that respect. Stacy Schiff Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book. Stacy Schiff Read Quote
