Shakespeare Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

I was a pretentious child. I grew up without a television. I read a lot of books and I loved Shakespeare. Still do.

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.

And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

Shakespeare's work is like a good song: you never really forget the main lines.

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.

The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.

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.

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.

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.

The thing I'd really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare's Globe. I'd like to walk along that. Don't worry, I won't get drunk and fall in.

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

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.