What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

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.

Above all things physical, it is more important to be beautiful on the inside - to have a big hear and an open mind and a spectacular spleen.

Memory shimmers as a crystal lakethat reflects all things invisible.

There's something else that makes a woman interesting, something beyond being young or being old. And I'm going to find out what that something else is before I die, I hope.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

Maybe the answer to Selective Service is to start everyone off in the army and draft them for civilian life as needed.

Don't be surprised if in the 21st century lectures on meditation appear in university catalogues for physics.

It doesn't help for you to name a character's first name be Mindy and then be like, "I'm nothing like the character."

In humility alone lies true greatness, and knowledge and wisdom are profitable only in so far as our lives are governed by them.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

Your spiritual gifts were not given for your own benefit but for the benefit of others, just as other people were given gifts for your benefit.