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.

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

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

There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with them.I don't know if it helps my research, but I get a big kick out of Mark Twain, who wrote "The Diaries of Adam and Eve." He wrote very funny stuff on them. I sometimes read things that are loosely related to what I'm thinking and writing about.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

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