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

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, th….

Poems are difficult to silence..

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….

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

Literate households in the 17th century would have had the Bible, John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," and a couple of other books. Shakespeare pl….

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 ….

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

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 ….

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 fir….

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 believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this ….

In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me ….

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

The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dan….

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 liv….

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure a….

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

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