Stephen Greenblatt Critic Quotations

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

But the trick of holding off and having all the pieces come together at the moment of the revelation was something I must have learned quite early.

But I wanted to make a claim: the claim here is that life is actually compelling and that Shakespeare's life is what he principally had to work with.

But if it doesn't have pleasure and interest, then it does not have life. And the same must be true about writing about literature.