Quotes About Shakespeare

I think working on Shakespeare was a big part of my time at drama school. I'm so glad that I got to know Shakespeare and got a chance to play great parts in Shakespeare, because it really teaches you - or taught me, anyway - everything.

I'd like to do a piece of Shakespeare. Any upcoming Shakespeare film. Just a bit to say I did a classic.

I wouldn't call myself a modern Shakespeare, but Shakespeare was probably to his generation what I am to mine.

In school I really loved Shakespeare, and I participated in a country-wide Shakespeare competition.

I love Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, tragedy is not just something that's bad. It's something that could be good and is bad.

To judge therefore of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rule is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country who acted under those of another.

With Shakespeare, there's no subtext; you're speaking exactly what you're thinking constantly.

I wasn't particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don't have to die the next.

When I went to Yale, I thought it would be like in Stenford 24 hours a day. Robert Brustein, former dean of the Yale School of Drama and founder of the Yale Repertory Theater was there, and we did all this very serious - I would go so far as to say completely humorless - Eastern European drama, as well as August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen, we weren't allowed to do William Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. I was not in the right place.

I think a very good movie director makes films to entertain people, but not to be considered like they were Cervantes, you know? One of the biggest problems now, with all the festivals and everything, is a confusion between the quality and the beauty and the highness of things. A film is a film. It's something to entertain you a couple hours. Not to be considered as if it were Shakespeare.

As Shakespeare said, there's nothin' cooler than droppin' the 'g's off of gerunds!

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?

Monarchs not only fashion their age, but are fashioned by it, so that they can become a sort of personification of the age. If Elizabeth I, independent, strong, represents the age of Shakespeare's heroines, a woman's heyday, Victoria represents another image of womanhood, predominant in the nineteenth century: a woman who, although queen in her own right, leaned on her husband, looked up to him, and went into perpetual mourning after his death. The feminist movement filled her with shocked horror and outrage.

Corneille is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest.

But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.

I think William Shakespeare's like a passport through your life: as a kid hearing about a play with fairies or witches or ghosts, you get excited by that possibility. Then later on you become interested in the psychology or the politics or the beauty of the language. You grow up with the plays. King Lear is one that I don't feel grown up enough to do yet.

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.

All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. Alas, poor Yorick, that's about death. And in Romeo and Juliet everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.

Learning (Shakespeare's plays) ...in school was a bit of a bore.

Shakespeare; the only man I'd ever love.

Almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today - but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

The filming of Shakespeare is always problematic, because he hates posing for the camera

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

People are always asking me to do Shakespeare - at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It's like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It's great therapy.

Nothing's true that I say, because I don't really want to say anything. I don't think my life's that cool, and I don't think my opinion's that valid. They're just silly jokes. Usually I just take a topic that isn't funny at all, like Shakespeare, and work backwards. I just try to find an unfunny subject.

When you're playing Shakespeare, it forces you to think and feel and speak all at the same time, which really is what acting is. It expands your imagination and expands your size of thinking.

Everyone feels loss and love and laughter. That's what connects humanity. It's why I love Shakespeare.

Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.

O,speak to me no more;these words like daggers enter my ears.(a fancy way of saying SHUT UP!)" — William Shakespeare "hamlet

I am a man who used to wear the tights. We traveled the country doing two Shakespeare plays for bored college students for about a year. I think I'd probably still be doing it now if I hadn't just randomly decided to go to a sketch group audition. That led to doing improv, which led to the Daily Show. But it was fun while it lasted.

Most authors have one idea per book. Shakespeare had two per sentence.

Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much.

The thing I'd really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare's Globe. I'd like to walk along that. Don't worry, I won't get drunk and fall in.

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me.

He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts. (Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost, IV)

I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly.

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 dad is a big extrovert - he's a doctor - but he always loved [William] Shakespeare and he took us to tons of theater.

in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It's just the nature of the words he writes.

...Having no recourse, I feel back on Shakespeare. Leif would recognize it and understand the context properly. With my remaining few seconds of consciousness, I quoted Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, who spoke these words to his former friend: "you are a Villain: I jest not." and then I collapsed into a pool of my own blood.

I was a stage actor for 20 years or so; I was leading men in classical things. 'Shakespeare,' you know. And now, I never play leading men. I'm that kamikaze comic that comes from the left, turns the table over, and leaves, or the hyper-intelligent yuppie scumbag if it's a drama.

It would be a wonderful experience to stand there in those enchanted surroundings and hear Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan read from their noble works. And it might be that they would like to hear me read some of my things. No, it could never be; they would not care for me. They would not know me, they would not understand me, and they would say they had an engagement. But if I could only be there, and walk about and look, and listen, I should be satisfied and not make a noise. My life is fading to its close, and someday I shall know.

Its extremely dangerous to compare anyone else to Shakespeare.

I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.