I don't fool myself. I can't see myself doing Shakespeare.
~By Sharon Tate ~
I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.
~By Rainer W. Fassbinder ~
I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.
~By Ted Lange ~
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
~By Mandy Patinkin ~
I say this quite deliberately, this is the finest Shakespearean performance I've seen.
~By Donald Wolfit ~
In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.
~By Christopher Eccleston ~
With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.
~By Lawrence Kasdan ~
What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
~By Brendan Fraser ~
It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
I've never really had a desire to do Shakespeare. For me, it's just too many lines.
~By Daniel Craig ~
Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
~By Trevor Nunn ~
The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
~By Kenneth Branagh ~
If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
~By William Hazlitt ~
It's incredibly moving to hear some of our greatest actors performing Shakespeare.
~By Judi Dench ~
Shakespeare was not meant for taverns, nor for tavern louts.
~By Samuel G. Engel ~
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
A team is a team is a team. Shakespeare said that many times.
~By Dan Devine ~
Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?
~By Steven Wright ~
First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English.
~By Lucy Liu ~
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
~By Harold Bloom ~
Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings.
~By Vanessa Redgrave ~
How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.
~By Horace Walpole ~
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
~By Howard Nemerov ~
Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.
~By Harold Bloom ~
I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
~By Jackson Browne ~
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
~By Ben Okri ~
So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
~By Trevor Nunn ~
One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
~By Kenneth Branagh ~
My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
~By Dick Schaap ~
Was there ever such stuff as great as part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you? - What? - Is there not sad stuff? What? - What?
~By George III ~
The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king.
~By Alex Cox ~
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.
~By Vivien Leigh ~
We have cut the text, but what remains are Shakespeare's words.
~By Edward Hall ~
First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
Yes, it's true, I've been called the Laurence Olivier of spoofs. I guess that would make Laurence Olivier the Leslie Nielsen of Shakespeare.
~By Leslie Nielsen ~
If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.
~By Richard McCabe ~
I'd like to do a piece of Shakespeare. Any upcoming Shakespeare film. Just a bit to say I did a classic.
~By Jim Varney ~
It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
~By David Crystal ~
On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.
~By Scott Turow ~
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
~By Marshall McLuhan ~
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
~By Stephen Sondheim ~
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
~By Andrew Wyeth ~
The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.
~By Michael Tippett ~
English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.
~By Lytton Strachey ~
I had never done Shakespeare before, but I don't think you can be an actor and not do it. There were moments when I thought, I'm just not going to be able to pull this off.
~By Jessica Lange ~
Most people don't know that I am an accomplished dramatic actor... But I've performed in several Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, except in this version, Hamlet lives in an apartment with two women, and has to pretend he's gay so that the landlord won't evict him.
~By John Ritter ~
Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.
~By Gary Oldman ~
I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
~By Blythe Danner ~
I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
~By Laurence Olivier ~
In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.
~By Lytton Strachey ~
The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.
~By Montgomery Clift ~
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
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.
~By Elizabeth Montagu ~
I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
To date or not to date that is the question. It's almost as important as Shakespeare's to be or not to be which deals with death.
~By Al Goldstein ~
Shakespeare is universal.
~By Harold Bloom ~
I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.
~By Anthony Hopkins ~
Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much.
~By Basil Rathbone ~
People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages.
~By George Weinberg ~
Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course, foreseen.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.
~By Antony Sher ~
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
~By Robert Graves ~
I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare. An actor must act.
~By Laurence Olivier ~
Shakespeare in Love... such smart writing of an alternative view of history, and such beautiful acting. Like most Americans, I'm a sucker for the accent.
~By Anita Diament ~
There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.
~By Terri Windling ~
You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.
~By John Bradshaw ~
Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.
~By Sam Waterston ~
I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I'd discovered Shakespeare - 'hey, there's a new guy in town, don't know if anyone's read him.' I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one.
~By Chiwetel Ejiofor ~
I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.
~By Howard Barker ~
I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.
~By Tallulah Bankhead ~
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
~By Robert Browning ~
Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.
~By Aaron Yoo ~
I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
~By Spike Milligan ~
The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.
~By Trevor Nunn ~
Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.
~By John Lithgow ~
But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.
~By Julie Taymor ~
When I first started acting, and we would all sit down and talk about Shakespeare and how great it was. I thought well, I suppose it is.
~By Judy Davis ~
I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.
~By Maximilian Schell ~
It's not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretending to be people that they're not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?
~By Jonathan Miller ~
In college, I started out doing musicals and Shakespeare.
~By Ray Liotta ~
Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
~By Edward Hall ~
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
~By Charles Darwin ~
I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
~By Rita Dove ~
There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
~By Alexis de Tocqueville ~
The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.
~By Vanessa Redgrave ~
I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.
~By Neil Patrick Harris ~
We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.
~By Uta Hagen ~
Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.
~By Michael Tippett ~
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.
~By Lloyd Alexander ~
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
~By Lukas Foss ~
Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.
~By Richard Branson ~
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.
~By Harold Bloom ~
Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
~By George Bernard Shaw ~
My dream as a youngster was to be like Olivier. To be a great stage actor. To be a great Shakespearean actor. To me that is the Olympics of acting.
~By Armand Assante ~
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
~By Alex Cox ~
I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
~By James M. Barrie ~
|