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

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.

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.

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

But I never listen to music while I'm writing.

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

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.