Quotes from Stacy Schiff

Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.

It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.

To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.

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.'

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.

In 'Plutarch,' her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that.

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.

The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.

Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched.