Stephen Greenblatt

“Poems are difficult to silence.”

“The quintessential emblem of religion — and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core — is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorpor...”

“There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize...”

“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 ou...”

“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 Y...”

“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.”

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