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"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."
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"Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours."
Author Name
Personal Development
"As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal."
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Personal Development
"There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing endures but personal qualities."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence."
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Personal Development
"Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing like a little judicious levity."
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Personal Development
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"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."
Love
"I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller."
Power
"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."
Writing
"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."
Life
"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."
Truth
"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."
Literature
"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!"
Life
"Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control."
Control
"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."
Literature
"But I never listen to music while I'm writing."
Music
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