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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.
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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More quotes by Stephen Greenblatt
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.
Stephen Greenblatt
Poems are difficult to silence.
Stephen Greenblatt
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.
Stephen Greenblatt
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.
Stephen Greenblatt
But I never listen to music while I'm writing.
Stephen Greenblatt
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
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
No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
Stephen Greenblatt
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain it is delusion.
Stephen Greenblatt
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.
Stephen Greenblatt
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
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
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
Stephen Greenblatt
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists it is accessible to everyone.
Stephen Greenblatt
Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig
Stephen Greenblatt
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.
Stephen Greenblatt
