Poems are difficult to silence.

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

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

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

Literate households in the 17th century would have had the Bible, John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," and a couple of other books. Shakespeare plays were cheap, so you could buy those, but a folio cost a pound, which was an incredible amount of money then.