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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits, so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power.

The franchise itself gives no real power, unless accompanied by the right on the part of all the possessors of it to elect something like an equal number of representatives.

Saddam Hussein has been tenacious in his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and, unless he is removed from power, he will eventually harm our nation and our allies. Every moment we delay allows him to grow stronger.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

To enable men to exercise that power is the object of protection.

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

During that space walk there will be some repositioning of the power so that the arm can be fully controlled by the robotic station that is in the Lab.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

Given the daunting challenges that we face, it's important that president elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one.

Every one, more or less, loves Power, yet those who most wish for it are seldom the fittest to be trusted with it.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

I have been, and will go on, fighting that damnable, dirty, rotten business with all the power at my command.

We look forward to the time when the power to love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

I felt the power of God as I'd never felt it before.

Power, as in the power structure, is why we are still using gas in cars.

The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.

The party in power, like Jonah's gourd, grew up quickly, and will quickly fall.

The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people.

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.

The United States cannot feed every person, lift every person out of poverty, cure every disease, or stop every conflict. But our power and status have conferred upon us a tremendous responsibility to humanity.