“The greatest tragedies were written by the Greeks and Shakespeare...neither knew chocolate.”

“Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare. Sparks also said his novels are like Greek Tragedies. This may actually be true. I can't check it out because, tragically, no really bad Greek tragedies have survived.”

“Let's dispel the idiotic notion that the plays were not written by Shakespeare. Of course they were written by Shakespeare. How can we look at someone with a body of work like Mozart and say that a human being is not capable of a body of work like Shakespeare's with language? We can't. He wrote the plays.”

“Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies. If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life.”

“In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask.”

“In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”