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.

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.

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.

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

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.

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

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.

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

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.

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.

You Can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is not on focus.

Anything happening, ” she whispered.“Aside from you blundering about like a lost elephant?” he asked, in the same low tone.She nodded, accepting the rebuke. “Aside from that.

I think that's one of the reasons it's nice to leave out a lot; it can become a lot more personal to people if there is room for them to put their own experiential time track on it.

I get really fantastic results when I just get out of my own way.

I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ..., which is never permissible in mathematics.

What has been doing in the last week, attacking Hollywood actresses [Meryl Streep] for criticizing him, I mean what would is this guy [Donald Trump] living in?

I'm a wild lady. Not.

Climate change is also clearly a matter of huge interest and concern for the scientific community.

One runs a business ultimately to do well so you can do good for everyone.

I don't think any child could really be happy between five and eight away from their parents