What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

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.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

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

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

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