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One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.

In the early days, I really felt the pain of not being able to find information easily. I guess that helped me to develop an urge to write things like a search engine.

With Shakespeare, because you invest so much time in working on material, it always sort of stays with you to some degree.

Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.

Anything one can do to provoke and inspire an interest in the works of Shakespeare in a young audience is fair game. Anything.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

There is a plethora of topics to explore. I sometimes think I may never live long enough to explore all of the unique story lines I have either in my head or waiting in my computer file.

Shakespeare is a wonderful language to speak, but it's also a world to get your mind into thematically.