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

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.

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.

When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.

Living someone else's vision, is proclaiming death to your imparted destiny, and proclaiming life to the destiny of the visionaries pursuing their visions.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you that you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.

We have to recognize that the freedom of the individual has to be protected not only from the power of the state, but even more so from economic and societal power.

The most important secret of salesmanship is to find out what the other fellow wants, then help him find the best way to get it

The biggest in the world is small in its beginning.

Truth is, every writer has to be a good editor, and you have to edit yourself. It's a skill every writer has to acquire.

The wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world... History is the true demonstration of Religion.

We are a very colorful family. Everybody knows our mistakes. But I think that people can relate to all of our mistakes and all or good and bad points.

I like strength. I depend on my own.