Carrie Preston Quotes

I always consider Shakespeare like a huge room. I mean, you open the door, and you can go anywhere.

We promise you a hundred Shakespeares.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

I'd love Shakey Bill to tell me a story - I mean, William Shakespeare, he could squeak a nib couldn't he?

Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

Toni Morrison was a big influence on my work since I was a teenager, what she did with English. I joke that I think she speaks 20 Englishes simultaneously, that she knows how to do that.

Shakespeare, he's in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells, speaking to some French girl who says she knows me well.

Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

I was reading all these male writers who were doing wild and wonderful things. It gave me permission to experiment.

Our actions are like the terminations of verses, which we rhyme as we please.

On stage or in the movies I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.

I personally was driven to be an actor for the love of telling a story. It was very closely linked to being a reader as a kid and being transported by literature and art. It had nothing - zero - to do with anything resembling fame.

A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You’ll find what you’re trying to say in him- as you’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'' - 'Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea.