“ Briefly (Vladimir Nabokov) caught the (Superman) fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the the Man of Steel's wedding night. Stacy Schiff
“ 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 ye… Stacy Schiff
“ She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one. Stacy Schiff
“ 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.' Stacy Schiff
“ There was good reason why Cleopatra’s subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions. Stacy Schiff
“ Hutton and Franklin spent all of January 3 together, in the course of which Franklin evidently informed his old friend, You have only left us the option of perishing by you or with you: we have chosen… Stacy Schiff
“ While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first a… Stacy Schiff
“ When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge which they may apply usefully for their country; but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened b… Stacy Schiff
“ Dimitri had driven his mother back to Montreux from the Lausanne hospital at dusk on July 2, in his blue Ferrari, on the last day of his father's life. Véra had sat silently for a few minutes and then… Stacy Schiff
“ Véra assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that – born at a time and place where women could and… Stacy Schiff
“ 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 a… Stacy Schiff
“ No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra’s world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer’s work was the Bible of the day. Stacy Schiff
“ Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil. Stacy Schiff
“ Cotton Mather believed sixty drops of lavender and a mouthful of gingerbread cured memory loss. Stacy Schiff
“ Aikhenvald saw Véra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on the poetic path. She was on every count his champion. The wife of another émigré writer phrased it differently: Everyone in the Russian community… Stacy Schiff
“ A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily—with wheat, barley, lentils—to feed Alexandria alone. Stacy Schiff
“ We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus’s further assertion that Egypt was a country in which the women… Stacy Schiff
“ A few months since the idea of witches riding through the air upon a broomstick, and that of philosophers upon a bag of smoke, would have appeared equally impossible and ridiculous, Stacy Schiff
“ What good were these experiments? went the skeptic’s question. To which Franklin replied, What good is a new-born babe? In some versions he continued: He may be an imbecile, or a man of great intellig… Stacy Schiff
