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"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."
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"Discipline is required in all human endeavours."
"As we passed his table, I saw that the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work - and it's author - in bondage."
"You can't always control what happens to you but you can master how you react to it."
Explore more quotes by Stephen Greenblatt
"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."
"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!"
"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."
"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."
"What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind."
"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."
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