If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.
~By Richard McCabe ~
The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.
~By Michael Tippett ~
Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.
~By Alanis Morissette ~
Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
~By George Byron ~
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 ~
Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.
~By Michael Tippett ~
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 ~
We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.
~By Uta Hagen ~
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 ~
My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
~By Dick Schaap ~
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 ~
Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.
~By Denzel Washington ~
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 ~
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 ~
I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.
~By Ian Mckellen ~
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
~By Orson Welles ~
A team is a team is a team. Shakespeare said that many times.
~By Dan Devine ~
Shakespeare is universal.
~By Harold Bloom ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.
~By Louise Jameson ~
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 ~
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
~By Chaim Potok ~
Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.
~By Brendan Behan ~
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
~By Irving Layton ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.
~By Gary Oldman ~
I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.
~By Neil Patrick Harris ~
It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.
~By Jessica Lange ~
We have cut the text, but what remains are Shakespeare's words.
~By Edward Hall ~
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 ~
The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king.
~By Alex Cox ~
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 ~
On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.
~By Scott Turow ~
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
~By M. H. Abrams ~
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 ~
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 ~
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.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
I don't fool myself. I can't see myself doing Shakespeare.
~By Sharon Tate ~
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
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 ~
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 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 ~
I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.
~By Trevor Nunn ~
I've got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I've done it.
~By Anthony Hopkins ~
Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
~By George Bernard Shaw ~
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 ~
Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.
~By Leonard Maltin ~
If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English.
~By Lucy Liu ~
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 aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
~By Robert Browning ~
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 ~
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 ~
You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really.
~By Janet Suzman ~
It's a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare.
~By Ted Rall ~
I'd like to do more Shakespeare. I'd like to do Iago in Othello. I look so benign. It would be interesting to see that black evil come out of my soul.
~By Kyle MacLachlan ~
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 ~
We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.
~By Charles Dance ~
It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done.
~By Judi Dench ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
~By Marshall McLuhan ~
I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.
~By John Lithgow ~
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 ~
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
~By Edward Bond ~
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
~By Mandy Patinkin ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 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 ~
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 ~
I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare's rubbish.
~By Allan Carr ~
I wasn't always such a great fan of Shakespeare, mind you. I can guess we all at one time had it rammed down our necks at school, which tends to take the edge off it.
~By Christopher Eccleston ~
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 ~
Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.
~By Patrick Stewart ~
I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
~By Christopher Isherwood ~
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 ~
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 ~
People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages.
~By George Weinberg ~
What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
~By Brendan Fraser ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 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 ~
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.
~By Alex Cox ~
It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.
~By Mark Rylance ~
To me, Shakespeare uses the supernatural elements to reveal his character's inner desires and fears.
~By John Foster ~
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 ~
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'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 ~
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