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 out in his own life. Stephen Greenblatt More Quotes by Stephen Greenblatt More Quotes From Stephen Greenblatt 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 first place. Stephen Greenblatt house world firsts 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 very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish. Stephen Greenblatt would-be long father What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man. Stephen Greenblatt passionate body men 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 and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth. Stephen Greenblatt pleasure interest knows In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough. Stephen Greenblatt phrases poet world No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered. Stephen Greenblatt office special writing 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 it is worth nothing. Stephen Greenblatt writing giving thinking 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 the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love. Stephen Greenblatt falling-in-love couple latin The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. Stephen Greenblatt specialists reason exercise The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. Stephen Greenblatt obstacles pleasure pain 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 precious-possessions wife beautiful 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. Stephen Greenblatt ginsberg howl copies [People in 1600s] didn't have many books. They would have been staggered by the personal libraries we have today, because books back then were incredibly expensive. Stephen Greenblatt library book people 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 hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports. Stephen Greenblatt sports book school I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough. Stephen Greenblatt thought good long way I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller. Stephen Greenblatt only great power book 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 his life, even though I've just written a biography! Stephen Greenblatt my-life you love life Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control. Stephen Greenblatt weird well control think What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off. Stephen Greenblatt behind without things life
