top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Nothing quotes
"It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing."
"The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything."
"Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing."
"There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence."
"Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it."
"Nothing I do can't be done by a 10-year-old with 15 years of practice."
"If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation."
Explore more quotes by Stephen Greenblatt
"The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind."
"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."
"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."
"I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough."
"I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!"
"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."
"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."
"What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off."
"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."
bottom of page