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.

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.

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.

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

To think critically, it is first maturing and distancing a bit from self, no matter what level one lives on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

You too can be as influential as the people that you admire. It is a matter of having the willingness to work relentlessly for it.

Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, don’t be demotivated

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

I do like a little make-up though. I like a little mascara and lip gloss at least. But when I go to the gym I'd feel weird wearing make-up.

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but in selection.

Interviewing is in some ways the art of memory.

An advertisement will be a good one - that is if the headline is really a "stopper."

I aint know the police was from Babylon And I aint know Im cold just like an avalanche