"Malcom X’s words woke me up to the real America. He is incredibly inspiring. It read like a modern Greek myth of a hero’s journey."

"Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all constantly responding to, or writing back against, the Homeric poems. The Athenian tragedy that is maybe most deeply engaged with rewriting and recreating “The Odyssey,” is Euripides' “Helen”, a provocative, brainy, funny play about the myth that Helen never went to Troy in the first place—the same myth that is central to HD's brilliant sequence “Helen in Egypt.” I translated the Euripides “Helen,” for a collection of Greek tragedy translations, “The Greek Plays.”"

"With drifter Marlon Brando’s memorable snakeskin jacket standing in for Eurydice’s lethal serpent, and the actor’s guitar for Orpheus’s lyre, Tennessee Williams’s retelling of the Greek myth drips with sweat and sex. I think of Marlon’s jacket whenever I see python on the runway, which is frequently."