Stephen Greenblatt

“Eve is a figure for the soul that each human should love. The commandment to be fruitful and multiply did not originally…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually…

— Stephen Greenblatt

There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

“The quintessential emblem of religion — and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core — is the sacrifice…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

“you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will…

— Stephen Greenblatt

“Libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin…

— Stephen Greenblatt

“I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

When I was quite young I came across a collection of [Franz] Kafka stories and read "The Judgment." I was just floored…

— Stephen Greenblatt

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never…

— Stephen Greenblatt

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

“You bitches, sows, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, blood suckers, [who] cry “Give, give! without ceasing” (Prov. 30:15–16). Come now, hear me, harlots,…

— Stephen Greenblatt

“The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness,…

— Stephen Greenblatt

Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem…

— Stephen Greenblatt

“Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds, where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

“In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength…

— Stephen Greenblatt

“On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius…

— Stephen Greenblatt