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

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.

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.

To me success means effectiveness in the world that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world-that I am able to change it in positive ways.

When I leave the car park at Melwood, I try and become a completely different person. I try to get away from it. You have got to. Otherwise you end up like Jamie Carragher - obsessed!

Some people make that decision at 15 and some people make it at 50, and most people never make it all.

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

I work out with a trainer, Anna Kaiser, three days a week.

I don't think I've ever googled myself.

Trace started on his way again, this time taking the lead. "She's five-four and weighs less than one-twenty. Matt can handle himself." "Says the man with the black eye.

It is our own evil thoughts which madden us.

I pick what are my priorities and I limit those priorities to less than five in my life and really in those particular areas put in the energy to try to make good choices.

We have already provided a strong humanitarian response to the problems in the Middle East and that response will be stronger within coming days.