Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Jay Greenblattis an American thinker, Shakespearean, literary historian, and Pulitzer Prize winning author. He is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the editor of the The Norton Shakespeareand a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 November 1943
CountryUnited States of America
Stephen Greenblatt quotes about
dirty reflection knights
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.
art psychics swerve
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
catholic way ghost
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
writing office special
No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
exercise reason specialists
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
pain obstacles pleasure
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
silence difficult
Poems are difficult to silence.
volcanoes firsts eruption
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.
writing listening-to-music
But I never listen to music while I'm writing.
writing dancing singing
Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig
writing thinking giving
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.
believe matter wanted
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.
believe way lifetime
I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.
believe broken care
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.