The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

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

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.

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

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

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.

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