The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.

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

One of my favorite writers is Michel de Montaigne. My wife gave me a beautiful 17th-century edition of Montaigne's essays translated by John Florio. That's probably my most precious possession.

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

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.

[People in 1600s] didn't have many books. They would have been staggered by the personal libraries we have today, because books back then were incredibly expensive.