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.

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.

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.

Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.

We've got to escape from narrowness. We're a movement, not a conspiracy. We've got to radiate contacts, and have as many people aware of us as possible. That's living, modern common sense.

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.

There's always a reaction based on fear. People assume if you're criticizing a decision to go to war, then you're saying something against the soldiers-which is not the case

So much of the habitat destruction and pollution is based on the simple principle that we somehow have been given free license over other species to degrade the planet.

I danced for 15 years of my life. Which was my love and my passion.

I think my primary audience is in some sense an adult audience, because I think that will then have a knock-on effect for children.

The money will go but the trophies will always be there.

Every person on earth learns it’s lesson by making different mistakes. The only source of knowledge is experience. Experience avoiding the mistakes you already made.

It is one thing to see the forward path and another to be able to take it. But it is better to have an ambitious plan than none at all.