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

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.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

I had to overcome the name Rock. If I'd been as hip then as I am now, I would have never consented to be named Rock.

That was really cool. I got to kiss a little boy. I was 7 and he was 10, and his name is Thomas Curtis. He was the first boy I've ever kissed in my entire life and he was three years older than me.

But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

I think they are looking for publicity and they are looking for a name for themselves.

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

Till I was 13, I thought my name was "Shut Up."

In The Name of the King is the right title. To be honest, I don't know who had the final idea for the title but I liked it and it has a strong connection to the movie's story.

Apart from being Jennifer Lewis. The name pulls people in.

Everyone calls himself a friend, but only a fool relies on it; nothing is commoner than the name, nothing rarer than the thing.

Vickie Lynn Hogan is my birth certificate's name.

It's just that back then we didn't know that was considered being a coproducer. I would sit on the side and say what I wanted musically, but at the time we thought if you aren't the one playing it, you don't get the credit. Now you'll start seeing my name listed as producer.

Iraq's elite Republican Guard is doing so badly they're changing their name to the Democratic Guard.

In these momentous hours of our history we call on every Hungarian worker who is led by devotion to the people and the country to join our Party, the name of which is the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party.

The name Air Supply sort of came from nowhere. I get a lot of my things in dreams and I just had a dream about it one night, and I woke up and said that's just got to be the name. That was in 1975.

Any political party that includes the word 'democratic' in its name, isn't.

In this country, when you finish second, no one knows your name.

I don't mind if my skull ends up on a shelf as long as it's got my name on it.

Naming a transition team varies with the intentions of the candidate; some candidates have been careful to name a transition team as much as a year in advance.

When I was a child of six or seven my father would show me the chapter in the prophet Isaiah where the name Immanuel is found; more than once he spoke to me of the faith he put in me.

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other - in balance with it... The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

The Pentagon still has not given a name to the Iraqi war. Somehow 'Operation Re-elect Bush' doesn't seem to be popular.

Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself, not to destroy an opponent.

I'll name names, you know I won't hold back.

These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them.

Without Liberty, Law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without Law, Liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.

Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.

As we begin this debate, I am confident that we will hear the supporters of this bill argue in the name of Ronald Reagan that this research is consistent with his long-held views about the sanctity of life.