Quotes by Stacy Schiff

About Stacy Schiff:

Stacy Madeleine Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author and guest columnist for The New York Times.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easie...

Stacy Schiff

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

Stacy Schiff

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely...

Stacy Schiff

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

Stacy Schiff

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

Stacy Schiff

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

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 aut...

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

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

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 a...

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

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

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

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

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 wor...

Stacy Schiff

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 ...

Stacy Schiff

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

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

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

Stacy Schiff

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

Stacy Schiff

Author Bio

  • NameStacy Schiff
  • DescriptionAmerican female Author, Pulitzer Prize winner
  • BornOctober 26, 1961
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionHistorian; Author; Journalist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Pulitzer Prize For Biography Or Autobiography