Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

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

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Reading, Literature, Ghost

  "Built to Last". www.nytimes.com. August 23, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

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

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Pain, Obstacles, Pleasure

  Stephen Greenblatt (2011). “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”, p.177, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Believe, Broken, Care

  84 Copy quote

• The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Exercise, Reason, Specialists

  Stephen Greenblatt (2011). “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”, p.180, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Catholic, Way, Ghost

  "An interview about Will in the World". "Bookworm" with Michael Silverblatt, stephengreenblatt.com. March 16, 2013.

  60 Copy quote

• Poems are difficult to silence.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Silence, Difficult

  "The Answer Man" by Stephen Greenblatt, www.newyorker.com. August 8, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Legacy, Warfare, Force

  Stephen Greenblatt (2011). “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”, p.86, W. W. Norton & Company

  8 Copy quote

• The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig - is to understand the nature of the occasion.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Writing, Successful, Dancing

  4 Copy quote

• Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Writing, Dancing, Singing

  5 Copy quote

• A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Dirty, Reflection, Knights

  Stephen Greenblatt (2011). “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”, p.12, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Firsts, Moments, Pleasure

  4 Copy quote

• Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Art, Psychics, Swerve

  Stephen Greenblatt (2011). “The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began”, p.3, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Believe, Matter, Wanted

  Stephen Greenblatt (2013). “Hamlet in Purgatory”, p.4, Princeton University Press

  7 Copy quote

• The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Names, Left Behind, Behinds

  6 Copy quote

• No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Writing, Office, Special

  7 Copy quote

• But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Pleasure, Interest, Knows

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  House, World, Firsts

  7 Copy quote

• I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Believe, Way, Lifetime

  4 Copy quote

• In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Phrases, World, Poet

  Stephen Greenblatt (2011). “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”, p.13, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Art, Real, Black And White

  15 Copy quote

• I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred Baboon." It's wonderful. It's a scientist's journal about baboons, but it relates to the search for human origin.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Reading, Quests, Sacred

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

  4 Copy quote

• I have lots of things that aren't so old that I value, such as a copy of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which he signed for me.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Ginsberg, Howl, Copies

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

  4 Copy quote

• In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Sports, Book, School

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

  5 Copy quote

• Literate households in the 17th century would have had the Bible, John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," and a couple of other books. Shakespeare plays were cheap, so you could buy those, but a folio cost a pound, which was an incredible amount of money then.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Couple, Book, Play

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Volcanoes, Eruption, Firsts

  25 Copy quote

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