94 Quotes by Stephen Greenblatt

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.

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

No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound?

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.

We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.

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.

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

The key point, as Epicurus’ disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.

If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?