Poems are difficult to silence.

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

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.

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