Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.

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.

Be soft enough not to break

Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.

Jesse Jackson has to get back to "I am somebody" instead of "I am some color."

Politics matters. Ideas matter. Democracy matters, because all of us need to be able to make a difference.

The senses do not deceive us, but the judgment does.

Listen to some good poetry. You see? It keeps us from thinking we are only what our blatant appetites describe us as.

Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely mistaken.

Success is not an accident. It is sheer hard work. There is no short-cuts. You have to take the stairs and you have to start from the bottom.

But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.