Top 56 Quotes About Reading Shakespeare
#2. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#3. Awareness of multiplicity of interpretation is the key to reading Shakespeare.
Laura Bates
#4. She should have read the damned play. She should have spent hours reading Shakespeare. The duke was making literature sound a lot more interesting than her governess had ever done.
Eloisa James
#5. Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.
Antony Sher
#7. I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
Rita Dove
#8. Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.
Tommy Hilfiger
#9. What I liked most was that George had class, the way he walked and talked, reading Shakespeare and all those books. He knew about van Gogh and Picasso, he gave me a book about Dali. And just the way he conducted himself, you could see it. He was very elegant in his manners.
Bruce Porter
#10. I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.
Laura Bates
#11. I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.
Robin Hobb
#12. there is no shortage of reading material in this house. Charlotte is an excellent writer, but Mr. Shakespeare is better, and if it's Branwell's wickedness you like, Papa says we may read Lord Byron in moderation." Emily
Lena Coakley
#13. 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
#14. If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
Bret Easton Ellis
#15. Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#16. The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.
Gilbert Highet
#17. Hamlet, I will argue, is a play about reading and misreading, about the difficulties of interpretation.
William Shakespeare
#18. Trust not my reading, nor my observations, Which with experimental seal do warrant The tenor of my book.
William Shakespeare
#19. In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.
Frederick Lenz
#20. If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.
Anna Brackett
#21. I have good reason to be content,
for thank God I can read and
perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
John Keats
#22. It is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead,
equally alive. I think the best parts of Shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. I have found it so. And so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. 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
#24. I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric ...
John Dryden
#25. People take England on trust, and repeat that Shakespeare is the greatest of all authors. I have read him: there is nothing that compares Racine or Corneille: his plays are unreadable, pitiful.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#26. The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.
John Dunning
#28. I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#29. Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
Harold Bloom
#30. What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
Virginia Woolf
#31. I was reading everything under the sun from music history to feminist literature to Shakespeare, which is why I'm not a complete idiot at this time.
Emilie Autumn
#32. I read everything by Ian McEwan, he is so elegant. I love reading anything about Shakespeare, too. He is my first love. If I had a time machine, I would be hanging out with him.
Kate Fleetwood
#33. Shakespeare's work had a liberating influence.
Paul C. Nagel
#34. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
Nikita Gill
#35. If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
Mortimer J. Adler
#36. She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.
E.M. Delafield
#37. Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.'
Geoffrey Rush
#38. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#39. As with all literature, the play should be read through the eyes of the author, as far as this is possible, which in Shakespeare's case means reading it through the eyes of an orthodox Christian living in Elizabethan England.
William Shakespeare
#40. Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.
Michael Tippett
#41. There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#42. She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare and she was used to him.
Stella Gibbons
#43. Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words ... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.
Al Pacino
#44. Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.
Arthur Smith
#45. I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there's the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare.
Luanne Rice
#46. I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Spike Milligan
#47. My dad is a retired Shakespeare professor, my mother a retired classicist. Suffice to say I grew up in a house full of books, where reading was encouraged if not required.
Sarah Dessen
#48. Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
William Shakespeare
#51. Reading old Gray? That's right. Physician's library just three books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great doctor.
Sinclair Lewis
#53. A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics[.]
Harold Bloom
#54. Maybe it's true that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But you'd go mad reading all of their rough drafts,
James Browning
#55. Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters ...
C.S. Lewis
#56. To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
William Shakespeare
