Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.