Shakespeare Quotes

People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

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.

In college, I started out doing musicals and Shakespeare.

I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting.

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

I wanted to play a TV detective because it's a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven't done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.

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.

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.

New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

Once an actor told me he went to the Shakespeare School of Acting, and I said, 'I went to the Shakespeare of Acting, too' and he said, 'Oh really?' And I said, 'I went to Shakespeare Elementary School in Chicago.' He didn't take the joke well, he didn't laugh and didn't think it was funny - I thought it was funny. It's all the same to me.

I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare.

Shakespeare said, nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

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.

If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.

Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.

It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.

We have cut the text, but what remains are Shakespeare's words.

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.'

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.

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.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

I just find the evangelical church too, well, restrictive. But the School of Practical Philosophy is nonconfrontational. We believe there are many forms of Scripture. What is true is true and will never change, whether it's in the Bible or in Shakespeare. It's about oneness.

Shakespeare was not meant for taverns, nor for tavern louts.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

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.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare's rubbish.

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.