Top 100 On Shakespeare Quotes
#1. As for my family, Ren was Ren and his family was his family and mine were who they were and usually this would be a Romeo and Juliet type of scenario. But I wasn't big on Shakespeare so my family was also just going to have to deal.
Kristen Ashley
#2. I've always been a sci-fi/fantasy guy. My book reports in school, whenever you didn't have to do it on Shakespeare, I did it on, like, Piers Anthony and Raymond Feist.
Jonathan Hickman
#3. Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.
Anthony Burgess
#4. We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.
Charles Dance
#5. It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.
Ally Carter
#6. In many ways, 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' is modeled on Shakespeare's Henry V, which relied on a chorus to explain in words the battles of Harfleur and Agincourt that could never be captured on the Elizabethan stage.
Ian Doescher
#7. 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.
Joseph Fiennes
#8. For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here.
Alan Cumming
#9. All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
Jonathan Kozol
#10. Yes! I'm also a big fan of the movie '10 Things I Hate About You,' which was also based on Shakespeare.
Amanda Bynes
#11. How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!
George Bernard Shaw
#13. I think working on Shakespeare was a big part of my time at drama school. I'm so glad that I got to know Shakespeare and got a chance to play great parts in Shakespeare, because it really teaches you - or taught me, anyway - everything.
Andre Holland
#14. Working on Shakespeare and learning about Shakespeare was the big takeaway for me.
Andre Holland
#15. I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.
Stephen Greenblatt
#16. 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.
John Sununu
#17. The highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably accompanied with cheerfulness. We have sufficient proofs on record that Shakespeare and Socrates were the most festive companions.
Thomas Love Peacock
#18. I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them.
Timothy Dalton
#19. In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I've written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I've ever known who's passed on.
Mandy Patinkin
#20. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
Ray Bradbury
#21. We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a little
of Shakespear. [Oct. 16, 1814, The Champion]
William Hazlitt
#22. Mr. Upward italicises "at the present time" because he realises that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist.
George Orwell
#23. Everyone steals. My favorite movie is Love Don't Cost a Thing with Nick Cannon. Which is based on Can't Buy Me Love, which is based on Kramer vs. Kramer, or something, which I think was Shakespeare.
Aziz Ansari
#24. If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.
Joyce Brothers
#25. So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying then. - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
J.D. Robb
#26. My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist. He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.
Christine Ebersole
#27. Doing Shakespeare on stage with Kenneth Branagh, I don't think it gets better than that.
Richard Madden
#28. Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.
George Edward Woodberry
#29. Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
Edward Hall
#30. When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
Ken Kesey
#31. As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.
Leonard Cohen
#32. Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
Amy Hempel
#33. Historically, Macbeth is one of the greatest kings Scotland ever had. He was on the throne for 19 years, and he simply has this dreadful reputation because Shakespeare manipulated history for the benefit of James I, who was paying him to write the play to blacken Macbeth's name.
David Hewson
#34. When I was in junior high, I would carry around this huge volume of Shakespeare. I just like the romantic vibe. I write about it because I fall in and out of love quite a bit. I was always pulling on my mother's heartstrings to get more love.
Fefe Dobson
#35. The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.
George Bernard Shaw
#36. Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#37. I play guitar; you'll find me at home strumming 'Vincent' on the guitar. I also read a lot of poetry, and Shakespeare was my first love, which was why I got into acting. A lot of the fighters are intelligent!
Dave Legeno
#38. I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!
Seanan McGuire
#39. My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
Dick Schaap
#40. A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.
Ethan Hawke
#41. This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.
Andrea Mays
#42. I am always going to be a theater actor at heart. One of my career goals is to do "Shakespeare in the Park" someday but for now I am really excited to get working on another movie.
Michael Stahl-David
#43. My father quoted everyone, from Shakespeare to Emerson, on the subject of destiny, and then he'd point out that except for the Greeks, everyone agreed: The stars do fuck-all for us; you must make your own way.
Amy Bloom
#44. You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.
Mark Forsyth
#45. I'm an actor. I started as an actor. I started on Broadway doing 'Hair' and Shakespeare in the Park.
Meat Loaf
#46. All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.
Jim Butcher
#47. Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you're Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all.
Ruth Rendell
#48. One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
Norman Mailer
#49. If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter.
Ai Weiwei
#50. Actors on stage, you can go from playing a myriad of roles, from Shakespeare to a Eugene O'Neil drama, and it's the norm. I came up in a world where you're supposed to be able to do three things very well. Act, sing, dance, paint, do something. The emphasis was on versatility.
Rocky Carroll
#51. You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.
Gayle Forman
#52. Oh Blimey O'Reilly's pantyhose...what is the point of Shakespeare? I know he is a genius and so on, but he does rave on.
What light doth through yonder window break?
It's the bloody moon, for God's sake, Will, get a grip!!
Louise Rennison
#53. I love e-books. I can carry the complete works of William Shakespeare around with me all the time. Just think about that. Whether I'm on an airplane or wherever. Being able to have a library in your back pocket basically is something I support.
Steve Earle
#54. You, Molly Shakespeare, have just publicly made out with the most desirable guy on campus. A guy that never commits to anyone. A guy that other guys are shit scared of and girls would gladly give a lung for.
Tillie Cole
#55. Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.
Roger Ebert
#56. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other.
William Shakespeare
#57. My poor body, madam, requires it: I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives.
William Shakespeare
#58. On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greater than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare, for he would haveheld up his head in their company.
Henry David Thoreau
#59. I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Oscar Wilde
#60. When I was about 16 or 17, I had a teacher who took a group of us to the National Theater in Washington, D.C., and I saw Ian McKellen do his one-man show - I think it was called Acting Shakespeare - and it completely bombed me; it put the zap on my brain in a big way.
Edward Norton
#61. Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?
Graham Greene
#62. If you're going to do Shakespeare, do Shakespeare. There's a reason why he's been performed for hundreds of years. His words affect people on a very deep level. He's the true humanist. That all comes through his text, his words.
Christian Camargo
#63. Shakespeare set a lot of his dramas in a historical perspective or war perspective, or he would study what was going on at that time.
Marcia Gay Harden
#64. 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?
Jonathan Miller
#65. William Shakespeare ... was baptized on April 26, 1564. When he was born is disputed, but anyone who argues that it was after this date is just being difficult.
Richard Armour
#66. At first I thought I would have to put on an English accent and try a sort of affected Shakespeare thing.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#67. Shakespeare is rich and beautiful, and it can be an amazing experience to read and to watch and to work on.
Campbell Scott
#68. I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.
Diane Ladd
#69. Shakespeare himself spoke of Heaven using wars as a punishment for perversities, lusts and passive barbarianism: If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to calm these vile offenses, It will come Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.
Fulton J. Sheen
#70. Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog And little mouse, every unworthy thing, Live here in heaven and may look on her, But Romeo may not.
William Shakespeare
#71. It is something to have gazed on the constellated white,
felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love.
It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous
in the only ways we know how.
Bryana Johnson
#72. Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
Steven Pinker
#73. Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean - not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.
Joshua Cohen
#74. The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.
Daniel Hannan
#75. If Shakespeare had been in pro basketball, he never would have had time to write his soliloquies. He would have always been on a plane between Phoenix and Kansas City.
Paul Westhead
#76. I wasn't a model schoolboy. Of course, I was forced to sit through Shakespeare and I really got into some of it, though it depended on who was reading it out.
Rufus Sewell
#77. People are always asking me to do Shakespeare - at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It's like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It's great therapy.
Al Pacino
#78. I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
Al Pacino
#79. 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 only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]
William Hazlitt
#80. I like Shakespeare, but I never know what the hell is going on.
Tracy Letts
#81. I'm sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube.
Peter Capaldi
#82. It was Shakespeare's notion that on this day birds begin to couple; hence probably arose the custom of sending fancy love-billets.
Washington Irving
#83. Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#85. Everyone has a golden. It could be anything - a song, a book, a pet, a person. Anything that makes you so happy your insides cry of pure joy. It feels like you're on drugs but better because it's a natural high. Shakespeare is my golden.
Brittainy C. Cherry
#86. I did Shakespeare in college, and the nerves I got doing Shakespeare are the same nerves I get doing 'Mad Men.' I want to get the dialogue just spot-on.
Kristoffer Polaha
#87. If music be the food of love, play on rock on . William Shakespeare
- love evolution
Michelle Mankin
#88. There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Bertrand Russell
#89. Almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today - but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
#90. At my school, Shakespeare wasn't on the syllabus - at least not for me.
Kelly Reilly
#91. Turns out there's a reason smoking is not allowed on construction sites.
Kathy Bryson
#92. I love writing literary stuff. My favorite writer is definitely Edgar Allan Poe - so imaginative and prolific. My second favorite writer would have to be Shakespeare - I love the emotion and human truths he touches on so beautifully.
MC Lars
#93. In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
A.S. Byatt
#94. Because of this it has been possible for the play to be read, as it so often has been since the Romantic period, as a credo, an apologia pro vita sua (a justification of his own life), on the part of Shakespeare the dramatist.
William Shakespeare
#95. Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed.
B.J. Ward
#96. And? you're thinking. Spaghetti Bolognese?! you're thinking. What's that got to do with anything? Well, as my homeroom teacher Mr. Rourke would say, "read on Macduff," which is something to do with Shakespeare. See? You've learned something already!
James Patterson
#97. It's Shakespeare, to have a single family in which human flaws and virtues are on such vivid display - and the constant struggle between those vices and those virtues to try to do good and fulfill one's duty.
Jon Meacham
#98. English literature is a glorious inheritance which is open to all - there are no barriers, no coupons, and no restrictions. In the English language and in its great writers there are great riches and treasures, of which, of course, the Bible and Shakespeare stand along on the highest platform.
Winston Churchill
#99. When you're on TV, you're looking at a half-page of material, trying to memorize it really quickly. By the time it's on TV, I've already forgotten what I said, but I can still recite my whole role from Shakespeare in the Park. It works a different set of muscles.
Jesse Tyler Ferguson
#100. it took at least five years to learn law after one left law school: one practiced economy for two years, learned Alabama Pleading for two more, reread the Bible and Shakespeare for the fifth. Then one was fully equipped to hold on under any conditions. "What
Harper Lee
