Top 100 Lear Quotes
#1. In his madness and his blindness he was Lear and Gloucester combined.
Susanna Clarke
#2. When I was growing up my favorite show was 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show', and I loved all the stuff that Norman Lear did.
Ryan Murphy
#3. When I closed in "King Lear" I went into a period of depression for about three weeks, and every actor I've talked to who's ever played a major, major Shakespeare role has done this.
Frank Langella
#4. What is your name?" asked Lear.
Caius," said Kent.
And whence do you hail?"
From Bonking, sire."
Well, yes, lad, as do we all," said Lear, "but from what town?
Christopher Moore
#5. Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.
Romesh Gunesekera
#6. People talk about the difference between radio acting, TV acting and stage acting, but I think it's all the same. For instance, when I played Vultan in 'Flash Gordon,' I put as much energy into it as I would with 'King Lear' - it's all part of the same thing.
Brian Blessed
#7. It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.
Paul Scofield
#8. I've been lucky to get some path-breaking films, which proved to be the turning point in my career. Be it 'Rock on!' 'The Last Lear' or 'Raajneeti,' directors started working in a different way.
Arjun Rampal
#9. Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear."
"Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?"
"I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.
China Mieville
#10. The actor is too prone to exaggerate his powers; he wants to play Hamlet when his appearance is more suitable to King Lear.
Sarah Bernhardt
#11. My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.
Ben Mendelsohn
#12. Counterfeit Kings is the King Lear of space operas. Science fiction has a fresh, new, no-nonsense voice and his name is Adam Connell.
Steven-Elliot Altman
#14. When we are born, we cry that we are to come to this great stage of fools,' I quoted from Shakespeare's King Lear.
Brittainy C. Cherry
#15. Lear's daughters and their loathsome husbands are all deservedly slaughtered for their ill treatment of an aged ruler (one of the reasons that tragedy remains so huge in Asia)
Boris Johnson
#16. I used to think 'King Lear' was an analysis of insanity, but I don't really think it is. When Lear is supposed to be at his most insane, he is actually understanding the world for the first time.
Ian McKellen
#17. Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.'
Simon Callow
#18. [Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.
Harold Bloom
#19. As far as getting my start, it was really Norman Lear, even aside from being on 'All in the Family.' He helped me get my start as a director. He was the one who said, 'Let him do 'Spinal Tap.' Let him give it a try,' because I had been trying for years to get that thing off the ground.
Rob Reiner
#20. Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.
Nick Hornby
#21. I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity
Harold Bloom
#22. Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.
Brand Blanshard
#23. I feel like I've been on EastEnders all my life and now I'm playing King Lear.
Ian Holloway
#24. He wanted a James Lear novel: near to constant episodes of sexual encounters strung together with a bit of mystery, and maybe, for window-dressing, some self-discovery.
Heidi Cullinan
#25. I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#26. If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.
Fernando Pessoa
#27. Directing Skyfall was one of the best experiences of my professional life, but I have theatre and other commitments, including productions of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and King Lear, that need my complete focus over the next year and beyond.
Sam Mendes
#28. Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
William Butler Yeats
#30. I think I'm going to have to get a flying license very soon, and maybe one of those Lear jets. It beats motorcycles all to hell.
Hunter S. Thompson
#31. I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general.
Christopher Moore
#32. In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.
Andrew Solomon
#33. Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
William Butler Yeats
#34. As Shakespeare put it in 'King Lear,' the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.
Christopher Hitchens
#35. The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.
George Steiner
#36. Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound...
{His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#37. I think that if Shakespeare had had access to CGI, he would have used it. Imagine Lear conjuring the storm and the lightning.
Julie White
#38. King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare - or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
Paul Scofield
#39. A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written.
Thomas Jefferson
#40. I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.
Louis Auchincloss
#41. All performances are different. I don't think it's necessary to compare one with another. I am just me playing the role of Lear. You're bound to get a Holm approach to it, whatever that may be. I just got out there and did it. I'm very much a doer in my acting.
Ian Holm
#42. The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
W. H. Auden
#43. I've never been that guy who says, 'Ooh, I have to play King Lear'. First off, that'd be a disaster anyway. I tend to read something and see who's involved, and then know I want to be part of it. But I don't think I'm through with comedy. I still love to make people laugh.
Ted Danson
#44. I did a lot of theatre when I started out. It was the Lyceum, the Citz, the Tron and the Traverse. I came to London and did the Royal Court, the National, 'King Lear' at the Manchester Royal Exchange. I did little bits of comedy, like 'Rab C Nesbitt,' but I wasn't predominantly about comedy.
Ashley Jensen
#45. I gave you all!" screeched Lear, waving a palsied claw at Regan.
"And you took your bloody time giving it, too, you senile old fuck," said Regan.
Christopher Moore
#46. I didn't grow up in a Norman Rockwell house ... my house was more akin to Norman Lear.
Michael P. Naughton
#47. The good parts are the people who don't make do. They're the interesting people. Lear doesn't make do.
Peter O'Toole
#48. I have no desire to play King Lear or Hamlet. I never had a grand ambition. I just followed my nose.
Liam Neeson
#49. If you are playing King Lear you are the centre of attention anyway. You don't need to draw attention to yourself. It's all laid out for you.
Ian McKellen
#50. When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.
Robert Wilson
#51. If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?
James Joyce
#52. You have to get through the Hamlet hoop as a young actor. Your classical qualifications are based on the quality of your Hamlet. And then, as an older actor, you have to get through the Lear hoop. And I'm approaching the Lear hoop.
Derek Jacobi
#53. I'm mainly an airport author, and if you're trying to take your mind off the journey, you're not going to read 'King Lear.'
Maeve Binchy
#54. To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago.
Roger Zelazny
#55. While tentbound high on Everest, Mallory and his companions would read aloud to one another from Hamlet and King Lear
Jon Krakauer
#56. Fool:
"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health,
a boy's love, or a whore's oath."
King Lear (III, vi, 19-21)
William Shakespeare
#57. When I turned 18, was the first time that I really started concentrating on politics. And I started doing so because I realized that in order to really create and generate change, it has to come from changing laws ... so I started campaigning for Norman Lear's foundation, which was Declare Yourself.
Hayden Panettiere
#58. The only time I've played a real baddy was when I was Regan in 'King Lear.'
Ashley Jensen
#59. King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#60. We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#61. I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, and they'll play him long after I have.
Rob Lowe
#62. Na, she's righted again," said a cool young fisherman, "and they've gotten down that unchancy mast. They maun have stout hearts and skeely hands that work her; but it's for life, and that learns folk baith pith and lear. There! - but it's owre now.
Mrs. Oliphant
#63. I think you have to find the humanity in the character and then the deterioration is a part of the process - the journey of the character. It's like playing King Lear. You can start off as a nice old man who finishes up crazy.
David Wenham
#64. From the American retelling of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story to the Japanese adaptation of King Lear in Ran, Shakespeare's cultural influence is virtually limitless.
Gordon Smith
#65. Whenever I say I made a record in the garage, people just assume that I have, like, a Lear jet parked in there or something. But really there's old luggage, a couple of bikes. It's big enough to put one minivan in. That's it. No dartboard. I'm so not macho.
Dave Grohl
#66. I want to keel over on stage playing King Lear at age 99 or something like that.
Rainn Wilson
#67. Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.
Emily St. John Mandel
#68. How pleasant to know Mr Lear! / Who has written such volumes of stuff! / Some think him ill-tempered and queer / But a few think him pleasant enough.
Edward Lear
#69. We all remember the fool who, almost alone, was true to Lear, but, then, of course, he was a fool.
William Shakespeare
#70. I would like to do 'King Lear.' But I would like to do it in Swedish.
Max Von Sydow
#71. There isn't a King Lear for women, or a Henry V, or a Richard III. You reach a level where you can handle that stuff technically and mentally, and it's not there.
Helen Mirren
#72. I was at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where I thought, in my naivete, I'd stay for the rest of my career. I'd thought I'd work up through the ranks and go from spear carrier - or in my case, the eunuch, which was several rungs below the spear carrier - to King Lear.
Christian McKay
#73. Lear wills his own death: "Break, heart, I prithee break
James Shapiro
#74. 'King Lear,' I've been seeing all my life. I mean, the great actors of my lifetime ... to join their company, as it were, by playing a part that's challenged them, is one of the great joys of being an actor who does the classics.
Ian McKellen
#75. KING LEAR: No.
KENT: Yes.
KING LEAR: No, I say.
KENT: I say, yea.
KING LEAR: No, no, they would not.
KENT: Yes, they have.
KING LEAR: By Jupiter, I swear, no.
KENT: By Juno, I swear, ay.
William Shakespeare
#76. In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?
Virginia Postrel
#77. In a very real way Norman [Lear] godfathered me into my career. He was the best mentor anybody could have ever had.
Richard Masur
#78. Norman Lear considers almost any Christian who speaks up for and acts on his or her faith to be 'dangerous.'
Donald Wildmon
#79. I am a man more sinned against than sinning" (Lear, 9.60).
James Shapiro
#81. Nathan "N.R." Gaddis did not say ::
2109 fellow Goodreaders [can't be wrong] gave [King Lear] 1 star. Many call it boring. Some even say it is predictable and has no moral lesson. That these people have the right to vote and to procreate is frightening to me.
Nathan "N.R." Gaddis
#82. To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.
Peter Ackroyd
#83. As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.
David Crystal
#84. Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.
Noel Coward
#85. I liked Norman Lear's ideology that you could trust an audience to stay with you.
Dave Finkel
#86. A laughing Lear would be monstrous. Not so a laughing Romeo and Juliet.
Mason Cooley
#87. O, let me kiss that hand!
KING LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
William Shakespeare
#88. I guess if they ever do a remake of 'Sophie's Choice,' I could play the Meryl Streep part. I've got to work on my Polish accent. Maybe I'll be the definitive King Lear one day. You know, if they ever feel that King Lear should be more Jewy.
Gilbert Gottfried
#89. I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain.
Damien Chazelle
#90. I'm still producing scripted features, and I am already working on a new documentary project with Norman Lear and Lara Bergthold. It is about the Declaration of Independence and the relevance of the document today. And it will be fun and engaging - I promise!
Linda Goldstein Knowlton
#91. The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.
Richard Preston
#92. In 2008, I just decided that there will come a time when I am dead and gone, and I only have a body of work to show. That was when I did films like 'Last Lear' and Deepa Mehta's 'Heaven On Earth.' They were serious roles.
Preity Zinta
#93. Will set his fork down and began cheerfully, in the manner of Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense:
"There was once a lass from New York
Who found herself hungry in York.
But the bread was like rocks
The parsnips shaped like -"
Cassandra Clare
#94. To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.
Oscar Wilde
#95. I have three daughters and I find as a result I played King Lear almost without rehearsal.
Peter Ustinov
#96. Her grandfather's books [ ... ] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning; every syllable was inexpressively precious
Irene Nemirovsky
#97. Come not between the dragon and his wrath. - William Shakespeare King Lear
Matthew Reilly
#98. It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared - we were working before, on average, 240, live people. If you could get them caring - the more they cared, the harder they laughed.
Norman Lear
#99. You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.
Norman Lear
#100. There was a Young Person of Smyrna,
whose grandmother threatened to burn her;
But she seized on the cat,
and said, Granny, burn that!
You incongruous old woman of Smyrna!
Edward Lear
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