Stephen Greenblatt Quotes
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Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig.
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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.
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No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
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Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
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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 was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
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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.
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The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
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The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
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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.
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Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
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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.