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. — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share Image
“Eve is a figure for the soul that each human should love. The commandment to be fruitful and multiply did not originally refer to… — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share Image
I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and… — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share Image
I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to… — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share Image
There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with them.I don't know if it helps my research, but I get a big kick out of Mark Twain, who wrote "The Diaries of Adam and Eve." He wrote very funny stuff on them. I sometimes read things that… — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share
I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about… — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share Image
“The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he… — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity. — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share Image
“you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence—atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else—your… — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share
A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in… — Stephen Greenblatt Copy Share Image
