Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

27 quotes in 405 categories

• No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
• 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…
• Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
• A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as…
• In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
• Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
• It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare…
• 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…
• 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…
• But I never listen to music while I'm writing.
• 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…
• The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
• What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
• 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…
• I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Poems are difficult to silence.

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