Quotes by Stephen Greenblatt - Page 1

Poems are difficult to silence.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Difficult
Silence
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But I never listen to music while I'm writing.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Listening To Music
Writing
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No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Office
Special
Writing
Cluttered
Desk
Rituals
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The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Obstacles
Pain
Pleasure
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Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Dancing
Singing
Writing
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Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Art
Psychics
Swerve
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Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Ghost
Literature
Reading
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The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Exercise
Reason
Specialists
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I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Teaching
Venice
Wings
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Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Force
Legacy
Warfare
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The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Astonishing
Behinds
Left Behind
Names
Attached
Shakespeare
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In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Phrases
Poet
World
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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 / Literary Critic
Copies
Ginsberg
Howl
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What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Men
Body
English Language
Passionate
Passionate Love
Remarkable
Young Man
English
Perhaps
Shakespeare
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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 / Literary Critic
Firsts
Moments
Pleasure
Remains
First Of All
Shakespeare
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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 / Literary Critic
Believe
Matter
Wanted
Believe Nothing I Believe
Shakespeare
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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 / Literary Critic
Draws
Firsts
House
World
Touch
Audiences
First Place
Holding
Onto
Readers
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I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Narrative
Exploit
Onto
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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 / Literary Critic
Quests
Reading
Sacred
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[People in 1600s] didn't have many books. They would have been staggered by the personal libraries we have today, because books back then were incredibly expensive.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Book
Library
People
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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.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Giving
Nuclear
Nuclear Physics
Physics
Pleasure
Thinking
Writing
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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 / Literary Critic
Catholic
Confronting
Ghost
Grappling
Way
Protestant
Shakespeare
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I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Soup
Life Love Thinking
Biography
Spitting
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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.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Beautiful
Precious Possessions
Wife
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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.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Father
Long
Long Story
Obsessive
Peculiar
Would Be
Yiddish
Trick
Life Long
Punch
Punch Line
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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 / Literary Critic
Astonishing
English Language
Eruption
Firsts
Volcanoes
First Of All
Shakespeare
Volcano
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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 / Literary Critic
Dancing
Successful
Writing
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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 / Literary Critic
Interest
Knows
Pleasure
Eventually
Meaning
Shakespeare
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Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Lifetime
Weird
Began
Originated
Published
Shakespeare
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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 / Literary Critic
Art
Black And White
Fancy
Real
Real Life
Shakespeare
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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 / Literary Critic
Available
Believe
Lifetime
Way
Work Believe I Believe
Work Believe Me
Accessible
Explain
Question
Shakespeare
Such A Way
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What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Astonishing
Relation
Matters
Finally
Uninteresting
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I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Academic
Good Enough Long
Good Long Way
Content
Relatively
Provided
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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 / Literary Critic
Book
Couple
Play
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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 / Literary Critic
Believe
Broken
Care
Complicated
Entertainment
Vehicle
Love Truth Believe
Works
Conveyed
Simply
Fractured
Narratives
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When I was quite young I came across a collection of [Franz] Kafka stories and read "The Judgment." I was just floored by that story. I couldn't understand it. I still don't. I'm talking about something I read more than 50 years ago. That story left a little scar on me.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Stories
Talking
Years
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A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Couple
Falling In Love
Latin
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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 / Literary Critic
Sports
Book
School
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There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with them.I don't know if it helps my research, but I get a big kick out of Mark Twain, who wrote "The Diaries of Adam and Eve." He wrote very funny stuff on them. I sometimes read things that are loosely related to what I'm thinking and writing about.
Stephen Greenblatt / Literary Critic
Saint
Thinking
Writing
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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 / Literary Critic
Dirty
Knights
Reflection
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Stephen Greenblatt Quotes - Page 1

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