What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

Poems are difficult to silence.

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.

When I was quite young I came across a collection of [Franz] Kafka stories and read "The Judgment." I was just floored by that story. I couldn't understand it. I still don't. I'm talking about something I read more than 50 years ago. That story left a little scar on me.

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

A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.

[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.