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.

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.

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

After all what's the lesson from all that?...Sometimes the title hasn't anything to do with the story...

Defy your own group. Rebel against yourself.

A dictionary is merely the universe arranged in alphabetical order.

I feel very proud of the work from the '80s because it is very bright and colorful.

History is a story written by the finger of God.

We have not found any smoking guns.

I turned a lot of people off over the past few years, but I know I can still turn out good music and turn everything all around, i've lost some of my best qualities. For that, I am sorry.

A story comes into your head fully formed, you know exactly the place, the setting, the people. All you've got to do is get it our and written as soon as you possibly can.

No one's female and male, we all have so many different traits. It's just a lie that these certain traits are male and these certain traits are female.

Character is half the reason we read. We're excited because of the plot, but we care because of the characters.