Shakespeare Quotes

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.

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?

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.

The reason the contracts are so long is because actors are very spontaneous; we may want to do Shakespeare one day and be Porky Pig the next!

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

Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.

Shakespeare's plays are more violent than 'Scarface.'

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.

It's easier to do Shakespeare than Spelling, and I know that sounds crazy, because the challenge of Shakespeare is living up to Shakespeare, living up to that word, not failing, you know, where with Aaron Spelling it's like, just try to look good. Or maybe don't use Spelling there, that's bad. No - you can. He's dead.

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.

I do think that, for instance, we've been very lucky to have theatrical careers and be associated with Shakespeare which sometimes gives you a kind of bogus kudos.

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?

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.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

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.

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

The media love coarse debate because coarse debate drives ratings and ratings generate profits. Unless the TV producer happens to be William Shakespeare, an argument is more interesting than a soliloquy - and there will never be a shortage of people willing to argue on TV.

A team is a team is a team. Shakespeare said that many times.

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.

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.

Shakespeare is universal.

I want to be known as 'The Big Shakespeare.' It was Shakespeare that said, 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.'

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.

How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.

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.

A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Seeing Shakespeare in the Park, for me, it's just this side of feeling like you've witnessed some kind of magic. It's this spell that you're under, to be part of that!

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.

It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done.