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Stephen Greenblatt Biography

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Jay Greenblatt (/ˈɡriːnˌblæt/; born November 7, 1943) is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. He is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

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Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

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.

Volcanoes, Eruption, Firsts, Pours, Words

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.

Believe, Matter, Nothing, Wanted, Working

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

Phrases, World, Poet, Short, Easy

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

Father, Long, Obsessive, Peculiar, Would Be, Yiddish

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

Art, Psychics, Swerve, Particular, Psychic

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

Astonishing, Behinds, Left Behind, Name, Names, Shakespeare

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.

Audiences, Firsts, House, Touch, World

I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred Baboon. " It's wonderful. It's a scientist's journal about baboons, but it relates to the search for human origin.

Human, Journal, Quests, Reading, Sacred, Search

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

Cluttered, Office, Rituals, Special, Writing

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.

Gets, Interest, Know, Knows, Pleasure

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Legacy, Warfare, Force, Forces

There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with them. I don't know if it helps my research, but I get a big kick out of Mark Twain, who wrote "The Diaries of Adam and Eve. " He wrote very funny stuff on them. I sometimes read things that are loosely related to what I'm thinking and writing about.

Huge, Read, Stuff, Thinking, Writing

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

Obstacle, Obstacles, Pain, Pleasure

A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.

Couple, Falling In Love, Hard, Latin, Like, Years

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

Listen, Listening To Music, Music, Writing

Literate households in the 17th century would have had the Bible, John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," and a couple of other books. Shakespeare plays were cheap, so you could buy those, but a folio cost a pound, which was an incredible amount of money then.

Amount, Bible, Book, Couple, Play, Plays

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.

Art, Black And White, Fancy, Life, Real, Shakespeare

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

Men, Passionate, Body, Wrote, Know, Language

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

Aria, Dancing, Jig, Like, Singing, Writing

When I was quite young I came across a collection of [Franz] Kafka stories and read "The Judgment. " I was just floored by that story. I couldn't understand it. I still don't. I'm talking about something I read more than 50 years ago. That story left a little scar on me.

Collection, Left, Scar, Stories, Talking, Years

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