Stephen Greenblatt

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

“Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens…

— Stephen Greenblatt

What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing…

— Stephen Greenblatt

“There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have…

— Stephen Greenblatt

I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but…

— Stephen Greenblatt

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

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…

— Stephen Greenblatt

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But…

— Stephen Greenblatt

I have lots of things that aren't so old that I value, such as a copy of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which he…

— Stephen Greenblatt

“progress—like those cartoons that begin with an ape and end with a man sitting at a computer—now gets lost in a hundred…

— Stephen Greenblatt

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what…

— Stephen Greenblatt

I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that…

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt

“With his contrasting vision of anxious, work-obsessed, overly disciplined Italians and happy-go-lucky, carefree Germans,”

— Stephen Greenblatt

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

— Stephen Greenblatt

“I am,” Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

“Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

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

— Stephen Greenblatt