Quotes About Shakespeare

If you were to ask everyone what 'Hamlet' was about, they might say, "It's about a prince, and he says, 'To be or not to be.'"

I was emotional. I wanted to be taken seriously. I was pretty emo. I was reciting Shakespeare monologues when I was 10. I still know the whole 'To be, or not to be...' monologue, because I knew it when I was 10.

I began to be very worried about Desdemona. We are given to understand that Othello's courtship of her consisted almost entirely of stories beginning "When I was stationed among the Anthropophagi—" or "I must tell you about a funny thing that happened during the siege of Rhodes." The dramatist Shakespeare would have us believe that she not only put up with this but actually enjoyed it: can that great connoisseur of the human heart really have thought this possible?

Good night. 'A thousand times good night.' That's Shakespeare, although why Juliet says it a thousand times, I don't know. Probably because Romeo wasn't listening the first time. Men should wake up and pay attention.

Perhaps we would have more sublime plays if we had more tolerance for and interest in imperfect plays. Because perfect plays are not sublime plays. Shakespeare's plays are weird and wonky and oddly shaped and wonderfully imperfect but sublime. They are as untidy men lime as nature is. Contemporary playwrights are often encouraged to make tidy plays rather than plays with cliffs and torrents

Mike only laughed. "'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.'" Gigi - "Methinks that is the only Shakespeare line thou doth know.

Almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today — but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.

Romeo and Juliet, the dyslexic version.

I think that Shakespeare is a s***. Absolute s***! He may have been a genius for his time, but I just can't relate to that stuff. "Thee and thous" - the guy sounds like a faggot.

Things you think you're saying for the first time ever, have been said better before by Shakespeare, though they may need saying again.

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.

When you're playing Shakespeare, it forces you to think and feel and speak all at the same time, which really is what acting is. It expands your imagination and expands your size of thinking.

There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!

The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.

In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.

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.

I am now of all humors that have showed themselves humors since the old days of goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight.

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.

All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures — an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.

The child was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up - that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God's best jokes.

Shakespeare's lines are a nursery of titles for other, better writers: Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters. At the very least, I have never named one of my books after his stuff.

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don't like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven's sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs

The fool doth think he is wise, yet it is the wise man that knows himself to be the fool As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1