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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

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Stephen Greenblatt
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 7
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
University Teacher
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Stephen Jay Greenblatt
Stephen J. Greenblatt
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Fall
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America
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Yorker

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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 the search for human origin.
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No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
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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 he did with that matter.
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The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists it is accessible to everyone.
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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 so.
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The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain it is delusion.
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Literate households in the 17th century would have had the Bible, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, and a couple of other books. Shakespeare plays were cheap, so you could buy those, but a folio cost a pound, which was an incredible amount of money then.
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Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
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Poems are difficult to silence.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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 how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.
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Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig
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But I never listen to music while I'm writing.
Stephen Greenblatt