Kelly Asbury Quotes

Shakespeare wrote about love. I write about love. Shakespeare wrote about gang warfare, family feuds and revenge. I write about all the same things.

Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire - when you're telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.

Every time has its own 'Hamlet.'

If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.

Shakespeare is all big themes, like the most amazing love, or the most scary war.

The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.'

Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.

All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. 'Alas, poor Yorick,' that's about death. And in 'Romeo and Juliet' everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.

I really like playing the bad guy. There are so many more objectives to play when you're mad or villainesque, or when there's some agenda that you have. That's drama, that's where the heart lives. I love playing the bad guy, but especially the bad guy who's still with the girl.

One of my favorite movies is 'A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.'

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.

In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly.

My ultimate game - or at least one I would really like to see - would be something where it was like the beginning of George R. R. Martin's 'Game of Thrones', where you're Ned Stark, and you know that one of your friends has been murdered, and you go to the capital city and you have to navigate this web of court intrigue.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.

Now that you have broken the treaties to which I am bound by oath, let these be dissolved. Henceforth, I will keep the city gate closed. I will fight for the inhabitants with all my strength. You may continue in your power until the Righteous Judge passes sentence on each of us.

Hamlet' is a real ensemble piece: you have to realise that he's just one part of the story.

I loved the movie 'Dangerous Liasons' with John Malkovich.

'Little Women' made me into a reader.

I'm not being presumptuous, I hope, when I say that 'The Crown' is little bit like 'The Godfather.' It is essentially about a family in power and survival.

I saw 'Othello' with Christopher Plummer and James Earl Jones.

Most people think of 'Wuthering Heights' as romantic; it's really not about that at all.

'Game of Thrones,' people say that it's a fantasy series, but it's a hell of a lot more than that. It attracts the so-called geeks and nerds, and God bless them, they're wonderful for getting right into the show. But primarily it's about family; it's power and betrayal and jealousy. It's all those wonderful things that a fantastic drama is about.

I always cry when Mufasa dies in 'The Lion King.' I just can't handle it.

I suppose 'This Little Life' and 'Brick Lane' both have things in common in that they have a female protagonist very much at the centre of the story, and they're subjectively told.