Malachi Kirby Quotes

Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.

I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.

Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it's good storytelling.

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

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.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.

I developed a prejudice in high school that it was all going to be boring. That kind of teenage, why-do-I-have-to-read-these-goddamn-classics feeling. And then you discover that the classics are classics because they're lively. They don't stick around because they're boring. If they're boring, they go away.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

I prefer to make movies which not only have a message for 'then' but a message for 'now.'

By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.

'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.

A good story never dies.

History is not was. It is.

I enjoy classics, but classics are classics for a reason. I prefer to focus on the future. There are a lot of new stories to be heard.

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

There might be children in Somalia or the Arctic who have never heard of 'Hamlet' or the 'Great Gatsby.' But you can bet they know 'Tarzan.'

Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.

I don't believe in updating. If a play works, it draws something from being true to its time.

Our interest in history always reflects our own times.

Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in.