"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."

Literature, First, Interest, Pleasure, Shakespeare

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"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."

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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."

Gilbert K. Chesterton, English Writer

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"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

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"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

George Orwell, British Author

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"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."

Jane Austen, British Writer

Literature, Books, Escape, Curiosity, Solitude

"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."

Gilbert K. Chesterton, English Writer

Literature, Fiction, Fact, World, Imagination

"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."

Haruki Murakami, Japanese Writer

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"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."

John Green, American Author

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"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

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"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."

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Explore more quotes by Stephen Greenblatt

"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, Truth, Care, Entertainment

"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, Audiences, Being, First, Sense

"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, Fact, Poems, Shakespeare

"But I never listen to music while I'm writing."

Music, Writing

"No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered."

Writing, Rituals

"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."

Literature, First, Interest, Pleasure, Shakespeare

"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."

Thought, Audiences, Content, Will

"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."

Life,

"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."

Work, Question, Shakespeare

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

Literature, Name, Shakespeare