Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

One of my favorite writers is Michel de Montaigne. My wife gave me a beautiful 17th-century edition of Montaigne's essays translated by John Florio. That's probably my most precious possession.

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

Poems are difficult to silence.

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.

I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred Baboon." It's wonderful. It's a scientist's journal about baboons, but it relates to the search for human origin.

I have lots of things that aren't so old that I value, such as a copy of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which he signed for me.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

But I never listen to music while I'm writing.

[People in 1600s] didn't have many books. They would have been staggered by the personal libraries we have today, because books back then were incredibly expensive.

Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.

I began with the desire to speak with the dead.