Quotes About Shakespeare

Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.

One of the reasons [William] Shakespeare is so endlessly fascinating is that you can look at that figure from about 10 different angles: Caliban in Shakespeare's day was probably viewed as a sort of comic, barbarian type, but into the 19th century there were productions where Caliban was the hero. He's a potential rapist of a minor. Is that a good thing? No, it is not. On the other hand, Prospero's got him cooped up in a cave and tortures him if he doesn't do what Prospero wants. Is that a good thing? No. Shakespeare doesn't let you off easy.

Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.

If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.

If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you're going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he's obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.

My parents were not at all backstage parents. We had none of that in the family. It was just very clear right away that I was an actor, even from 4 years old. I've never waited a table. I taught some - I'll teach classes in improv or Shakespeare, but there's some motor in me that needs to do that.

In terms of technology and science, tomorrow does know more than yesterday; but when it comes to emotions, living with uncertainty, terror, I'm not sure we know any more than Shakespeare did, or the Buddha. And the power of new things - the iPhone or Facebook - is so strong and intoxicating that we sometimes forget that none of them can fundamentally change our relation to ourselves and to what matters.

In the summer of 2009, I was at the Shakespeare lab at the public theater in New York.

Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's difficult. But I discovered that it's easy because it's so brilliantly written. The words are perfect, and the language is intelligent and very emotional.

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

"To be or not to be is" [by William Shakespeare] beyond anything I can comprehend. I understand it on a superficial level, but the depth of it just boggles my mind. I think it's probably the greatest of all speeches ever written.

I'm in a whole different part of show business. I'm not even part of Shakespeare in Love.

There's very few people - like Shakespeare - who, no matter what, were gonna do what they did. For the rest of us, there's a lot of events that have to happen in order for things to end up the way they are.

I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself.

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs

My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. ... (when asked who wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening') Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you can imagine it taking two men to write one song. ... Good authors, too, who once knew better words now use only four-letter words writing prose. ... Brush up your Shakespeare and they'll all kowtow.

To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.

Shakespeare, he's in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells, speaking to some French girl who says she knows me well.

I would love to do Shakespeare in New York.

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

If Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing wrestling shows.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

I did about 2000 covers altogether, for all sorts of books - from Shakespeare to James Bond - and I always had the idea that I must give 100%, no matter who the author was.

I tend to look at the world more from Voltaire's perspective. Incidentally, if you haven't read Candide lately, it's a fabulous book. It's riotously, laugh-out-loud funny in a way that no Shakespeare comedy will ever be.

Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.

Dylan is so brilliant. To me, he makes William Shakespeare look like Billy Joel.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

As an actress and comedienne, I'm a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of 'Twelfth Night' there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack?

We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which the dissident in exile is seen as a bold figure, and those who choose to work with restrictions on their freedom are considered patsies for repressive governments. Let's not forget that most writers in history have lived under nondemocratic regimes: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe didn't actually enjoy constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech.

My first interaction with William Shakespeare was an American production and there was an actress, playing Puck, who sounded like Mickey Mouse. When she said, I'll put a girdle around the earth in 40 minutes," I was amazed - the idea of Puck traveling around the Earth in 40 minutes was amazing to me. My dad, who was a scientist, I remember him telling me that Sputnik circled the globe in an hour in a half. And I thought, "Wow, Puck is twice as fast as Sputnik."

If we claim heritage in Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, we also acknowledge that it was for liberties guaranteed Englishmen by sacred charters our fathers triumphantly fought. While wisely rejecting throne and caste and privilege and an Established Church in their new-born state, they adopted the substance of English liberty and the body of English law.

You live in a society that is shaped in every possible way by the Bible. The language you use, the laws you obey (and disobey), the founding principles of your nation, the disputes about abortion, homosexuality, adultery - these and so much else in your world are rooted in the Bible. You don't have to read it for its truth value. You should read it to understand how your world got the way it is, the way you would read the constitution or Shakespeare.

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

A man can't turn tail and run just because a little personal risk is involved. What did Shakespeare say? "Cowards die a thousand deaths, the brave man... only 500"?

If I was white I would have been like John Wayne... I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play

I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare.

I think this [Gnomeo & Juliet] is the closest I ought to get to Shakespeare to be honest.

In theatre you can't ad lib, so you want to pick really good material, like David Mamet or Shakespeare or whatever. You want to be really careful about what you do. But in the movies, you do have more wiggle-room. You do have more opportunities to improvise. It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script.

Books have survived television, radio, talking pictures, circulars (early magazines), dailies (early newspapers), Punch and Judy shows, and Shakespeare's plays. They have survived World War II, the Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, and the fall of the Roman Empire. They even survived the Dark Ages, when almost no one could read and each book had to be copied by hand. They aren't going to be killed off by the Internet.

I went to drama school for three years, and the whole thing there is that hopefully you are introduced to a man called William Shakespeare who is the greatest of all time of all storytelling.

Shakespeare is a great psychologist, and whatever can be known of the heart of man may be found in his plays.

Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one's place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea - one swims where one wants.