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.

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.

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.

In reality there is no cause or effect, there is only the indifference of the universe.

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.

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