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"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."
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"Before making a snap judgment, ask yourself if it really is something that has hurt you or simply just made you angry at yourself for allowing it to happen. It's amazing what 'sleeping on it' can do. A new day sees a new beginning."

"Who I am? Am I thinking?"

"Never underestimate the power of a simple thought."

"You are not a human being, but you are a thinking and dreaming machine."

"I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme."

"They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned."

"Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois."
Explore more quotes by Stephen Greenblatt


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."
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