Top 72 Quotes About Shakespeare's Work
#1. I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.
Rufus Wainwright
#2. I'm constantly intimidated by Shakespeare's work. Trying to decipher what he's saying and holding on to that thought - not just as an actor, but as a human being - is a rigour.
Zoe Wanamaker
#4. Shakespeare's work is like a good song: you never really forget the main lines.
Michelle Dockery
#5. If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you're going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he's obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.
Timothy Dalton
#6. I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.
Jorge Luis Borges
#7. It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.
Edward Hirsch
#8. I'm one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn't do Shakespeare ... The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.
Nicolas Cage
#9. What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays - all of them but one or two - thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death - the justly revered First Folio.
Bill Bryson
#10. Come on then, I will swear to study so
To know the thing I am forbid to know
- Berowne
William Shakespeare
#12. The records - what little we know about Shakespeare, including the records of the plays in his playhouse - were often the story of how quickly they came off if they didn't work. They had to move on. They were absolutely led by box office.
Kenneth Branagh
#13. Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
Robert Wilson
#15. Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;
Conscience is but a work that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!
William Shakespeare
#16. From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.
Lee Hall
#17. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.
William Shakespeare
#18. Shakespeare is rich and beautiful, and it can be an amazing experience to read and to watch and to work on.
Campbell Scott
#20. You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.
Ajay Naidu
#21. 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
#25. I never wanted to do Shakespeare; I never liked watching it, it's always frightened me, and I've never been any good at it. But I really wanted to work with the director Tim Carroll and Mark Rylance.
Samuel Barnett
#26. For so work the honey bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.
William Shakespeare
#27. 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
#28. This rough magic I here abjure and when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses that this airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book.
William Shakespeare
#30. For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins
Shall forth at vast of night that they may work
All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made 'em.
William Shakespeare
#31. Twitter can no more produce analysis than a monkey can type out a work of Shakespeare.
Eric Schmidt
#34. I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger I recover them.
William Shakespeare
#35. 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
#36. To have a sense of contemporary ownership of Shakespeare is the most important thing to his work.
Tim Crouch
#37. I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the North; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots as a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, 'Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.
William Shakespeare
#38. I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.
Samuel West
#39. After each performance of an Austin Shakespeare production, audiences are invited to stay for a ten-minute discussion of the work. And this tradition continues in our New York run.
Jeff Britting
#41. Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven't really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now - people were the same then, too - that's what's so wonderful and powerful.
Michelle Dockery
#42. The vital accessories to my work are my reference books, such as the complete Shakespeare and a prayer book, and a large refuse bin.
Beryl Bainbridge
#43. Each of my Shakespeare pieces is different to the other, but each espouses a set of philosophies common to all my theatre work.
Tim Crouch
#44. With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.
Ruben Santiago-Hudson
#45. Why, universal plodding poisons up The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long-during action tires The sinewy vigor of the traveller.
William Shakespeare
#46. Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.
William Shakespeare
#47. Life is an admirable arrangement, isn't it, little mother. It is so clever of it to have June in every year and a morning in every day, let alone things like birds, and Shakespeare, and one's work.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#48. 2 In chapter 3 of The Problem of Pain, Lewis writes, We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
William Shakespeare
#49. Character halts without aid of the imagination, which our classes in Shakespeare and Browning, music and drawing, recognize not only as amusement and by-play of the mind, but a co-ordinate power. Its work is unhappily styled fiction; for to idealize is to realize.
C. A. Bartol
#50. The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.
Jorge Luis Borges
#51. With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.
Amish Tripathi
#53. It's certainly hard to find fault with a work that quotes Shakespeare, Homer, and a dirty limerick about "the young man from Oswego.
Simon Sheppard
#54. I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
Umberto Eco
#55. I grew up with Shakespeare, and there are so many wonderful teachings in those plays. The stories are all so unique and timeless. There is just so much learning in that body of work, and that is something I will always go back to.
Juliet Rylance
#56. There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.
Ian Hart
#57. O world, world! thus is the poor agent despised. O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set a-work, and how ill requited! Why should our endeavor be so loved, and the performance so loathed?
William Shakespeare
#58. Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?'
'Thou speak'st aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night.
William Shakespeare
#59. I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.
Benmont Tench
#60. It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
Lafcadio Hearn
#61. A third ... candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.
Bill Bryson
#63. Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.
Cass Sunstein
#65. If all the year were playing holidays; To sport would be as tedious as to work.
William Shakespeare
#66. Nature listening stood, whilst Shakespeare play'd
And wonder'd at the work herself had made.
Charles Churchill
#67. When Xena finished I just really wanted to work with Shakespeare's material.
Renee O'Connor
#68. Whether you're doing Shakespeare or Disney, good work is good work.
Jonathan Tucker
#69. Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.
Carl Sandburg
#70. William Shakespeare was a brilliant writer and he only wrote the truth. So, if I don't believe it, I have to work really hard to see what that truth is so that I do; that's the only way I can make it believable for the audience.
Condola Rashad
#71. I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats;
If it be man's work, I'll do't.
William Shakespeare
#72. 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
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