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 ~
If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey? ~By Steven Wright ~
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 ~
Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair. ~By Eugene Ionesco ~
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 ~
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable. ~By M. H. Abrams ~
Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater. ~By Michael Tippett ~
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature. ~By Anne Stevenson ~
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 ~
Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other. ~By Edward Hall ~
I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education. ~By Tallulah Bankhead ~
I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare. ~By Louise Jameson ~
Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare. ~By Gene Tunney ~
There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them. ~By Kenneth Branagh ~
I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent. ~By Christopher Isherwood ~
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 ~
My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics. ~By William Kempe ~
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 ~
People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages. ~By George Weinberg ~
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being. ~By Edward Bond ~
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 ~
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 ~
It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written. ~By Jessica Lange ~
If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English. ~By Lucy Liu ~
Shakespeare is universal. ~By Harold Bloom ~
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers. ~By Lloyd Alexander ~
A team is a team is a team. Shakespeare said that many times. ~By Dan Devine ~
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 ~
My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down. ~By Dick Schaap ~
On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare. ~By Scott Turow ~
Shakespeare has no answers for us at all. ~By Edward Bond ~
I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me. ~By Samuel West ~
Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much. ~By Basil Rathbone ~
It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing. ~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
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 ~
A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good. ~By Robert Graves ~
The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare. ~By Michael Tippett ~
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 ~
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 had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material. ~By Orlando Bloom ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience. ~By Trevor Nunn ~
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate! ~By Robert Browning ~
What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet? ~By Brendan Fraser ~
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 ~
To me, Shakespeare uses the supernatural elements to reveal his character's inner desires and fears. ~By John Foster ~
Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext. ~By Gary Oldman ~
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 ~
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world. ~By Mandy Patinkin ~
If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently. ~By Richard McCabe ~
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 ~
I don't fool myself. I can't see myself doing Shakespeare. ~By Sharon Tate ~
Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral. ~By Christopher Eccleston ~
Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge. ~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
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'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 ~
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 ~
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 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 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 ~
Shakespeare was not meant for taverns, nor for tavern louts. ~By Samuel G. Engel ~
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 ~
We have cut the text, but what remains are Shakespeare's words. ~By Edward Hall ~
I don't know how this company got the name National Shakespeare Company, because it was literally like retards employing retards. ~By Rob Corddry ~
Wouldn't you like to have heard the voice of Shakespeare, or Jesus Christ? ~By Henry Irving ~
I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain. ~By Jackson Browne ~
It's incredibly moving to hear some of our greatest actors performing Shakespeare. ~By Judi Dench ~
Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading. ~By Michael Tippett ~
Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. ~By George Byron ~
In college, I started out doing musicals and Shakespeare. ~By Ray Liotta ~
I say this quite deliberately, this is the finest Shakespearean performance I've seen. ~By Donald Wolfit ~
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 ~
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 ~
Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in. ~By Brendan Behan ~
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare. ~By Frederick Henry Hedge ~
If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it. ~By Andrew Denton ~
I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare's rubbish. ~By Allan Carr ~
I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me. ~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 ~
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance. ~By James Joyce ~
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 ~
Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book. ~By Charles Lamb ~
How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians. ~By Horace Walpole ~
Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation. ~By Denzel Washington ~
I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare. ~By Thomas Bowdler ~
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 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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently. ~By Sam Waterston ~
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 ~
Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me. ~By John Lithgow ~
It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done. ~By Judi Dench ~
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 ~
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant. ~By Virginia Woolf ~
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