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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Your tears are my prayers.

Knowledge is the most prized commodity in the entire universe, and it is infinite in its commodity.

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

You're not going to be liked by everybody when you speak the truth. I don't speak the truth to put people down I don't speak the truth to show disrespect.

The NAACP is a wonderful organization . . . But do you realize if tomorrow morning we had complete integration, all them cats would be outta work?

Money ain't everything.

Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.

At its core, health is simple: eat the right amount for your body, don't ingest chemicals or fake foods, and move more.

I know that many ailments can be healed with food by nourishing your body instead of taking drugs.

The proud, the cold untroubled heart of stone, that never mused on sorrow but its own.