"There are many perspectives moving like waves of darkness across our shocked spirits as we read King Lear, and Shakespeare privileges none of them." --This speaks to Shakespeare's wonderful impersonality, which lends to his characters so much of their own vitality. He will not lecture them and command them what to do; he allows them the privilege of speaking and acting for themselves.

"...sometimes in my unruly fashion I follow my much-missed friend, the late Anthony Burgess, in the mental enterprise of wondering how Hamlet and Falstaff would have fared in the same play." --I envy this mental legroom.

"A skeptical awareness that our lives are perpetually in flux, that we are always undergoing change, separates Montaigne and Shakespeare from Plato." --I think this is very astute, and is perhaps why Shakespeare and Montaigne seem so vivid and alive to me where Plato feels so flat.

"The art of writing lines, replies, which express a passion with full tone and complete imaginative intensity, and in which you can none the less catch the resonance of its opposite--this is an art which no poet has practiced except the unique poet Shakespeare." --This articulates something which has always dazzled me about Shakespeare. He is never carried away by his own characters, or his own poetry. His poise is immense.

"To seek the writer Shakespeare in his work is a vain quest, but to seek the work in the writer can be a rich enterprise." -- This distinction seems fruitful to me. To trace the path of the *writer* through his works is interesting; to trace the path of the *man*, far less so.