Shakespeare Quotes

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.

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.

I don't fool myself. I can't see myself doing Shakespeare.

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.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.

On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.

There's a reason Tony Stark makes fun of 'Thor,' and mentions 'Shakespeare' in the park in 'The Avengers.' It's great to play high drama and comedy alongside a modern story.

I think academics are infuriating. For every expert on Shakespeare there is another one to cancel his theory out. It drives you up the wall. I think the greatest form of finding out the truth is through fantasy.

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.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Wouldn't you like to have heard the voice of Shakespeare, or Jesus Christ?

Yes, it's true, I've been called the Laurence Olivier of spoofs. I guess that would make Laurence Olivier the Leslie Nielsen of Shakespeare.

Ooh, it's too embarrassing to share my innermost romantic secrets - although I have written Danielle the odd poem. If anything they are more comedic than romantic. They used to be well-received but that was before she started studying Shakespeare at drama college. Now I feel so inept.

We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.

The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.

The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.

You'll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.

Shakespeare would never have gone far in today's politically correct world.

You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

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.

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.

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.

Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

To me, Shakespeare uses the supernatural elements to reveal his character's inner desires and fears.

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.