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

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

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.

[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.

One of my favorite writers is Michel de Montaigne. My wife gave me a beautiful 17th-century edition of Montaigne's essays translated by John Florio. That's probably my most precious possession.

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.

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.