[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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.