Top 100 Quotes About Shakespeare
#1. If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did ... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.
Michael Morpurgo
#2. If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.
Mark Strong
#3. There are prating coxcombs in the world who would rather talk than listen, although Shakespeare himself were the orator, and human nature the theme!
Charles Caleb Colton
#4. People assume that I'm very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I've only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I'm happy to go along with it.
Hugh Laurie
#5. I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.
Lauren Groff
#6. Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
Laura Riding
#7. Shakespeare's taught me that there are more words in the English language than I have got in my head.
Zoe Wanamaker
#8. Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too.
Elizabeth Knox
#9. Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.
Bill Bryson
#10. If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623 - the famous First Folio.
Bill Bryson
#11. Shakespeare told us precious little of the man whom he entombed in his linguistic sarcophagus.
John Green
#12. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
#13. I'm crazy about Shakespeare, who was a notorious word inventor. And my wife is an English teacher, and she's hilarious.
Rob Delaney
#14. Actors want to do Shakespeare again and again, or want to do Hamlet. When you hear one guy do Hamlet and another guy do it, it's going to be a whole different experience.
Joshua Bell
#15. 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.
Gary Lineker
#16. You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?
Stan Lee
#17. You will never see the ends of his armies. They blanket the Earth as a storm blankets the sky, but the sun will never rise again."
I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, yeah. You demonic all think you're Shakespeare. Really nice. Good-bye." Then I took off her head and the rest of her burned up.
Courtney Allison Moulton
#18. 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.
Julie Taymor
#19. Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.
William Ernest Henley
#20. Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.
Mark Ruffalo
#21. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare
Jorge Luis Borges
#22. My mom started working at the California Shakespeare Theater in Oakland when I was two years old, so I've always grown up around theater.
Zendaya
#23. I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never plotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.
Ben Jonson
#24. There's nothing wicked in Shakespeare, and if there is I don't want to know it.
Emily Dickinson
#25. I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.
Trevor Nunn
#26. Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly.
Alasdair Gray
#27. I want to take a trip to Shakespeare's brain and vacation there with his thoughts may be I also start writing about twisted love and betrayals.
Megha Khare
#28. Men always say there is no female Shakespeare.' 'Humph! You study the fellows who say that, and you'll see they are a long way from being Shakespeares themselves. Why shouldn't women have the same privilege?
Miles Franklin
#29. 'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'
Sarah Palin
#30. 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
#31. One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
Kenneth Branagh
#32. Let me leave you with a positive thought. William Shakespeare once wrote: "The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite." They call this the Hidden Economy and it is not based on greed or love of money, but on unconditional, selfless, boundless and unstinting Love.
Etienne De L'Amour
#33. Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different.
Jean Aitchison
#34. No, sir.' She withdrew her hand. 'Quoting Shakespeare will get you nowhere.
Jane Aiken Hodge
#35. Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.
Mark Burnett
#36. Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
Harold Bloom
#37. Every time I do a movie like 'Finding Neverland' or 'Chocolat' or 'Shakespeare' in Love,' we deal with the creative process, but there's humor and fun along the way. I always love that kind of movie.
Harvey Weinstein
#38. Shakespeare is just some bloke who keeps ranting "what light trough yonder window breaks" its the moon for god sakes!
Louise Rennison
#39. I've always been way more attracted to playing imposing characters than the hero. I've always been more intrigued by Iago in Shakespeare than playing Romeo. That was always boring to me.
Kevin Durand
#40. Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition.
Samuel Johnson
#41. Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#42. You may be able to read Bernard Shaw's plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#43. A cheerful genius suits the times, / And all true poets laugh unquenchably / Like Shakespeare and the gods.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#44. Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#45. 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
#46. Oh, as the tragedies of Shakespeare have revealed, the fall of kings is but fodder for the riches entertainments.
Robert Alexander
#47. Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
Stephen Greenblatt
#48. I met an immortal humani once, a man called William Shakespeare, who wrote that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. -Aoife the Shadows
Michael Scott
#49. Nothing in this world is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Kerry Patterson
#50. As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.
Edward Bond
#51. Alexandra was tall and blond, with a balcony you could do Shakespeare from.
Simon R. Green
#52. Anger's my meat; I sup upon myself, And so shall starve with feeding. Volumnia says this in Shakespeare's Coriolanus. She - steely, controlling - is far more interesting than Coriolanus. Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.
Lauren Groff
#53. I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.
Orlando Bloom
#54. Often in America people would assume that [as an English actor] you've had some sort of deep, classical training, or that you're a Shakespeare enthusiast. I have zero interest in me performing Shakespeare.
Bill Nighy
#55. I remember the will said, 'May God thy gold refine.' That must be from the Bible."
"Shakespeare," Turtle said. All quotations were either from the Bible or Shakespeare.
Ellen Raskin
#56. William Shakespeare: My muse, as always, is Aphrodite.
Philip Henslowe: Aphrodite Baggett, who does it behind the Dog and Crumpet?
Marc Norman
#57. Shakespeare's stories are still very strong. He structured fantastic stories about things that were fundamental to the human being and psyche.
James McAvoy
#58. Tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition's ladder - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar
Liaquat Ahamed
#59. For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana
#60. Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!
Cynthia Ozick
#61. It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
John Keats
#62. You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really.
Janet Suzman
#63. William Shakespeare sounds to me like some kind of faggot.
Gene Simmons
#64. People think for Shakespeare you have to have a big English accent, but it's not true. He designed it so it can be performed in any accent in any time period.
Vinny Guadagnino
#65. Shakespeare in the park? Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?
Tony Stark
#66. There is nothing either good or bad, said Shakespeare,
Dale Carnegie
#67. Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.
Samuel Johnson
#68. 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
#69. Her father said 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.
Harper Lee
#70. I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
Irving Layton
#71. After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?
Dejan Stojanovic
#72. I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.
Ion Tiriac
#73. Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.
William S. Burroughs
#74. It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical.
Hilary Mantel
#75. You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy.
Robyn Schneider
#76. Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai;
Nicholas Ostler
#77. I think Willim Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.
Kurt Vonnegut
#78. I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.
Mordecai Richler
#79. In the works of Shakespeare, the most wonderful genius the world has ever known, there is the enormous number of 15,000 different words, but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.
Joseph Devlin
#80. 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
#81. When I first started acting, and we would all sit down and talk about Shakespeare and how great it was. I thought well, I suppose it is.
Judy Davis
#82. If you haven't read Shakespeare's Hamlet yet, it means that you haven't reached the summit of the literature yet!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#83. When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
Stephen Sondheim
#84. To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#85. To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first. William Shakespeare.
Lisi Harrison
#86. I got an M.F.A. in acting from NYU, and part of our training is to learn how to use swords in combat situations in a performance and Shakespeare plays where you have to fight.
Danai Gurira
#87. If you put Buddha, Jesus Christ, Socrates, Shakespeare, Arjuna, Krishna at a dinner table together, I can't see them having an argument.
Hugh Jackman
#88. Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.
Jamie Campbell Bower
#89. My father quoted Shakespeare to me often and when I lay a book down with splayed pages he told me better to be cruel to animals, children even, but never so cruelly treat a book.
Christine Wade
#90. I did do some Shakespeare on film, it's really difficult. It's really interesting, because I was doing a series in Canada called 'Slings and Arrows' and it was about a company based around the Stratford Festival.
Rachel McAdams
#92. My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#93. The reason there's no modern-day Shakespeare is because he didn't have anything to do except sit in a room with a candle and think.
Chris Cornell
#95. When Shakespeare copied chroniclers verbatim, it was because he knew they were good enough for his audiences. In a more polished age he who could so move our passions, could surely have performed the easier task of satisfying our taste.
Horace Walpole
#96. Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.
Robyn Schneider
#97. There were moments of despondency when Shakespeare thought himself no poet, and Raphael no painter; when the greatest wits have doubted the excellence of their happiest efforts.
Charles Caleb Colton
#98. Ice princess? Hardly. She was the opposite of cold. Christ, just the sight of her made Matty want to speak in fucking verse like he was Shakespeare incarnate. Genna
J.M. Darhower
#99. 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.
Andrew Wyeth
#100. 'Star Wars' is mythology. It's like Greek mythology or Shakespeare. It's the story of good versus evil over a very long span of time. The storytelling is universal and timeless.
Michael Franti
