top of page
.png){kind=small}
Shakespeare Quotes
"I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line."
24
"Yes, it's true, I've been called the Laurence Olivier of spoofs. I guess that would make Laurence Olivier the Leslie Nielsen of Shakespeare."
11
"I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare."
10
"You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen."
8
"What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?"
6
"Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral."
6
"It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written."
6
"We have cut the text, but what remains are Shakespeare's words."
6
"With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western."
6
"Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare."
6
"In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced."
5
"It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done."
5
"Shakespeare was not meant for taverns, nor for tavern louts."
5
"I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition."
5
"We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare."
5
"Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it."
5
"Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world."
4
"I've got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I've done it."
4
"It's a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare."
4
"Was there ever such stuff as great as part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you? - What? - Is there not sad stuff? What? - What?"
4
"We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works."
4
"I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."
4
"Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently."
2
bottom of page