Top 47 Stephen Greenblatt Quotes
#3. 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
#4. The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.
Stephen Greenblatt
#5. the government-controlled Saudi daily Al-Riyadh published a column declaring that "the Jews' spilling human blood to prepare pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact.
Stephen Greenblatt
#6. 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.
Stephen Greenblatt
#7. 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
#8. he "obliterated by the praiseworthy use he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.
Stephen Greenblatt
#9. The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Stephen Greenblatt
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons.
Stephen Greenblatt
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
Stephen Greenblatt
#21. Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.
Stephen Greenblatt
#22. 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
#23. 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
#26. In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
Stephen Greenblatt
#27. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.
Stephen Greenblatt
#28. Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee,
Stephen Greenblatt
#29. Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives they have.
Stephen Greenblatt
#30. 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
#31. You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
Stephen Greenblatt
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
Stephen Greenblatt
#35. 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
#36. Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
Stephen Greenblatt
#37. Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
Stephen Greenblatt
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. The bookworm - "one of the teeth of time," as Hooke put it - is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well.
Stephen Greenblatt
#41. affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?
Stephen Greenblatt
#43. Place of the philosopher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages.
Stephen Greenblatt
#44. The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.
Stephen Greenblatt
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
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