Top 76 Quotes About King Lear
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. While tentbound high on Everest, Mallory and his companions would read aloud to one another from Hamlet and King Lear
Jon Krakauer
#5. 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
#6. The only time I've played a real baddy was when I was Regan in 'King Lear.'
Ashley Jensen
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I want to keel over on stage playing King Lear at age 99 or something like that.
Rainn Wilson
#12. 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
#13. I would like to do 'King Lear.' But I would like to do it in Swedish.
Max Von Sydow
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. '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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.
David Crystal
#21. O, let me kiss that hand!
KING LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
William Shakespeare
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I have three daughters and I find as a result I played King Lear almost without rehearsal.
Peter Ustinov
#27. 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
#28. Come not between the dragon and his wrath. - William Shakespeare King Lear
Matthew Reilly
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.'
Simon Callow
#39. Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.
Nick Hornby
#40. 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
#41. I feel like I've been on EastEnders all my life and now I'm playing King Lear.
Ian Holloway
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. I have no desire to play King Lear or Hamlet. I never had a grand ambition. I just followed my nose.
Liam Neeson
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.
Louis Auchincloss
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound...
{His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general.
Christopher Moore
#57. I will do such things,
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.
William Shakespeare
#59. And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say 'This is the worst.
William Shakespeare
#61. Fare thee well, king: sith thus thou wilt appear,
Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here.
William Shakespeare
#65. I profess myself an enemy to all other joys, which the most precious square of sense possesses, and find I am alone felicitate in your dear highness love.
William Shakespeare
#66. Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter! My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him. *all cheer for Shakespearean insults*
William Shakespeare
#67. 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
#68. Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is cheap as beast's.
William Shakespeare
#70. Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least; nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds reverb no hollowness.
William Shakespeare
#72. I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty according to my bond; no more no less.
William Shakespeare
#73. Kent. Who's there?
Fool. Marry, here's grace and a cod-piece; that's a wise man and a fool.
William Shakespeare
#75. Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant. What place this is, and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments. Nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
William Shakespeare
#76. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
