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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
Book
Writer
Bleeds
Hard
Bits
Yorker
Giving
Books
Predict
Heart
Fall
Picked
Years
America
Thrill
Give
Latin
Love
Littles
Falling
Reportage
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Little
Couple
Alma

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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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But I never listen to music while I'm writing.
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Poems are difficult to silence.
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Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig
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The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists it is accessible to everyone.
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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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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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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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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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