Shakespeare Quotes

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.

My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

One of things I'd love to do one day is a Shakespeare with Trevor Nunn. I've done musicals with him, but never Shakespeare. There's no one better.

Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote.

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.

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.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

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.

Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.

I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.

Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge.

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.

If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.

Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much.

We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.

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.

You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.

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.

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.

I always loved the creative process, from 'Shakespeare in Love' to 'Finding Neverland' to 'Basquiat'; whether it's serious, or it's comedic, whether it's the 'inside look' at that, it seems to be a theme of what I do.

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.