Latest Stephen Greenblatt Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• [People in 1600s] didn't have many books. They would have been staggered by the personal libraries we have today, because books back then were incredibly expensive.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Book, People, Library

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Couple, Book, Play

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• I have lots of things that aren't so old that I value, such as a copy of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which he signed for me.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Ginsberg, Howl, Copies

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• One of my favorite writers is Michel de Montaigne. My wife gave me a beautiful 17th-century edition of Montaigne's essays translated by John Florio. That's probably my most precious possession.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Beautiful, Wife, Precious Possessions

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Talking, Years, Stories

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Sports, Book, School

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Falling In Love, Couple, Latin

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Reading, Quests, Sacred

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Teaching, Wings, Venice

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• 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.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Writing, Thinking, Saint

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com