Quotes from 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.

Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

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.'

When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up.'

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.

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.

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.

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

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.

It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry.

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.

Politics have long been defined as "the systematic organization of hatreds.

The witch hunt stands as a cobwebbed, crowd-sourced cautionary tale, a reminder that—as a minister at odds with the crisis noted—extreme right can blunder into extreme wrong.

When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.

Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.