Shakespeare said, nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.
~By Dyan Cannon ~
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 ~
I think academics are infuriating. For every expert on Shakespeare there is another one to cancel his theory out. It drives you up the wall. I think the greatest form of finding out the truth is through fantasy.
~By Joseph Fiennes ~
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 ~
What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
~By Brendan Fraser ~
I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.
~By Neil Patrick Harris ~
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 don't know how this company got the name National Shakespeare Company, because it was literally like retards employing retards.
~By Rob Corddry ~
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 ~
You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.
~By Mandy Patinkin ~
I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
~By Stephen Fry ~
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 ~
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.
~By Lloyd Alexander ~
Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.
~By Aaron Yoo ~
An actor should be ready to play any role within reason. For example, I think the most ridiculous thing for me to do would be to try and play Shakespeare.
~By Glenn Ford ~
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 ~
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 ~
I don't fool myself. I can't see myself doing Shakespeare.
~By Sharon Tate ~
Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.
~By John Lithgow ~
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
~By Charles Darwin ~
I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.
~By Sharon Gless ~
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
~By Harold Bloom ~
If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?
~By Steven Wright ~
To me, Shakespeare uses the supernatural elements to reveal his character's inner desires and fears.
~By John Foster ~
This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.
~By Mark Akenside ~
One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.
~By Patrick Stewart ~
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
~By Mandy Patinkin ~
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 ~
Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
~By William Collins ~
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 ~
It's a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare.
~By Ted Rall ~
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 ~
And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.
~By Julie Taymor ~
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.
~By Dick Bruna ~
Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.
~By Michael Moriarty ~
It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.
~By Jessica Lange ~
In college, I started out doing musicals and Shakespeare.
~By Ray Liotta ~
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 ~
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 ~
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
~By Orson Welles ~
I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.
~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 ~
If you got what it takes, you'll make it. If you don't, Shakespeare couldn't help you.
~By Jack L. Chalker ~
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 ~
Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
I've never done anything for money. My first love is things of limited commercial appeal. I could be happy doing Shakespeare for the rest of my life.
~By Karen Allen ~
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.
~By Jessica Lange ~
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 ~
I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
~By Julie Walters ~
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 ~
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 ~
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
~By Marshall McLuhan ~
Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.
~By Michael Tippett ~
If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English.
~By Lucy Liu ~
I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.
~By Nathalie Sarraute ~
Wouldn't you like to have heard the voice of Shakespeare, or Jesus Christ?
~By Henry Irving ~
Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.
~By Denzel Washington ~
Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
~By Edward Hall ~
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 ~
We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.
~By Charles Dance ~
In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
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 ~
The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.
~By Colin Firth ~
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 ~
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 ~
How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.
~By Horace Walpole ~
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 ~
Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much.
~By Basil Rathbone ~
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 ~
But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.
~By Patrick Stewart ~
Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.
~By Sam Waterston ~
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
~By James Joyce ~
I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.
~By Ted Lange ~
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
~By Edward Bond ~
My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
~By Dick Schaap ~
And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.
~By James Earl Jones ~
It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.
~By Mark Rylance ~
A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
~By Gustav Stresemann ~
I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
~By Jackson Browne ~
Shakespeare is universal.
~By Harold Bloom ~
I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.
~By Vivien Leigh ~
Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.
~By Mark Strong ~
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
~By Robert Browning ~
Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
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 ~
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
~By Irving Layton ~
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 ~
I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.
~By Don Van Vliet ~
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 cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.
~By Louise Jameson ~
Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.
~By Christopher Eccleston ~
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
~By Jeanette Winterson ~
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 ~
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
~By Hubert H. Humphrey ~
Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
~By Eugene Ionesco ~
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