Top 82 Shakespeare Writing Quotes
#1. With Will Shakespeare writing your government's propaganda, you can't go wrong, can you?
Peter Hambleton
#2. For me, if Shakespeare was around today, he'd be writing screenplays - a big Hollywood movie.
Douglas Booth
#3. The thing that is so singular and stunning about Macbeth - indeed, it strikes one straightaway - is that all the magic Shakespeare put into writing it manages so entirely to harrow and astonish the soul.
William Shakespeare
#4. 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
#5. The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
A.A. Milne
#6. In the same way that Shakespeare was writing very much for his time, he was also unearthing observations that would last for generations beyond him.
Alexis Denisof
#7. Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs;
William Shakespeare
#8. O, how I faint when I of you do write, Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, And in the praise thereof spends all his might To make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame.
William Shakespeare
#9. 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
#10. I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.
John Logan
#11. Writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone's favorite galaxy far, far away.
Ian Doescher
#12. 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
#13. This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf
#14. It would positively be a relief to me to dig Shakespeare up and throw stones at him.
George Bernard Shaw
#15. Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
Jay-Z
#16. Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
Martin Amis
#17. Critchley and Webster's fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded.
Hari Kunzru
#18. To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
William Shakespeare
#19. 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
#20. When he was alive, you shared a great affinity. A love of writing, books, Shakespeare, journalism, a certain way of looking at the world," Marla says. "You must have felt very validated by him, understood for who you were. Your incredible connection to him was very empowering.
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
#21. Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.
Nicholas Sparks
#22. 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
#23. Shakespeare is not writing Christian fantasy but Christian realism, and this entails martyrdom and suffering on the part of the innocent. This is the real world in which Shakespeare found himself.
William Shakespeare
#24. 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
#25. Shakespeare broke a mold. After about five years of writing, he saw women as women, including the bind they had been put into. No other playwright, writing before Shakespeare or at the same time as Shakespeare, had ever seen women as women.
Tina Packer
#26. When you are writing, you do not need to be as good as Poe, Shakespeare or Rowling. You need to be as good as you!
Giuseppe Bianco
#27. What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body; there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact.
Kenneth Patchen
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. William Shakespeare sounds to me like some kind of faggot.
Gene Simmons
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Never durst a poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink was tempered with love's sighs.
William Shakespeare
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The hardest part of writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was probably the sheer amount of iambic pentameter and tiptoeing around certain scenes I knew would be hot-button issues for 'Star Wars' fans.
Ian Doescher
#37. There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#38. I'm quite sure Shakespeare enjoyed writing Iago much more than he did writing Othello. If you write about someone you love, what the hell are you supposed to say about that person? It's much better to have something between you and your main character that grates.
Henning Mankell
#39. I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
Jill Scott
#40. Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote.
H. C. Bunner
#41. [T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.
Michael D. O'Brien
#42. Let there be gall enough in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter.
William Shakespeare
#43. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. In writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars,' I had the freedom to go beyond the original script and add asides, soliloquys and even new scenes. The main characters all get a soliloquy or two - or in Luke's case, several.
Ian Doescher
#48. I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...
John Geddes
#49. 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
#50. Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
William Golding
#51. I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
Charles Bukowski
#52. I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me.
Walter Raleigh
#53. It's a myth that older writers can't write for younger audiences. Shakespeare wasn't 15 when he wrote Romeo and Juliet.
Tracy Keenan Wynn
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?
Roy H. Williams
#57. 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
#58. Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story ... Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)
L.M. Montgomery
#59. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.
Julia Stiles
#60. Some people consider the way Shakespeare was writing about Ophelia as erotomania-that she was delusional in thinking that Hamlet was in love with her. But I don't think so.
Jack White
#61. People's good deeds we write in water. The evil deeds are etched in brass.
William Shakespeare
#62. 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
#63. And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them into shapes, and give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare
#64. I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.
Louis Auchincloss
#65. I'd be the first person to say I can't write dialogue. My dialogue is very utilitarian and is designed to move things forward. I'm not Shakespeare. It's not designed to be poetic.
George Lucas
#66. Shakespeare in Love ... such smart writing of an alternative view of history, and such beautiful acting. Like most Americans, I'm a sucker for the accent.
Anita Diament
#67. If Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing wrestling shows.
Chris Jericho
#68. If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.
Lloyd Kaufman
#69. If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter.
Ai Weiwei
#70. The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament.
Aleister Crowley
#71. You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare
Erica Jong
#72. Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#73. If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.
Robert Benchley
#74. I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.
William Shakespeare
#75. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
James Shapiro
#76. Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#77. My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
Dick Schaap
#78. Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets;Jonson was theVirgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.
John Dryden
#79. Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears
Moist it again, and frame some feeling line
That may discover such integrity.
William Shakespeare
#80. Will Fortune never come with both hands full,
But write her fair words still in foulest terms?
William Shakespeare
#81. No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
William Butler Yeats
#82. American radio is the reverse of the Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare's time the world's greatest dramas were acted with the most primitive technical arrangements; on the American air the world's most primitive writing is performed under perfect technical conditions.
George Mikes
