Zoe Wanamaker Quotes

I think you need brains to do any Shakespeare with any authority. I could do Shakespeare, but not with any authority.

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

Obviously we had to study Shakespeare at school, but to be honest, I was not a fan. I found the language very difficult, and I didn't enjoy watching it or studying it. I auditioned five times for the Royal Shakespeare Company early on in my career, and I didn't even get past the first rounds.

Anything one can do to provoke and inspire an interest in the works of Shakespeare in a young audience is fair game. Anything.

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.

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?

In school I really loved Shakespeare, and I participated in a country-wide Shakespeare competition.

Shakespeare is a wonderful language to speak, but it's also a world to get your mind into thematically.

Shakespeare language is fantastic, and to be honest, you don't need to do anything to Shakespeare.

I find Shakespeare terrifying. When Simon Russell Beale does a speech, I understand every word of it, but if I did the same speech, people would be going, 'Huh? What?'

Was Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware of all the riches subsequent critics have found in his plays.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

By all means, let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes, but let us study them for our guidance: that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke.

There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.

It meant so much to me as a kid to see professional theater and hear Shakespeare's words.

Literature has become too psychological.

Shakespeare is the best writing ever. It's incredibly rich, dense, expressive language.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

It is easier to analyze a work in its form, in its evolution, than simply to love it with all the living forces of our heart. It is easier to define its peculiarities and its details than to draw out of it its emotion, its thought.

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

Critchley and Webster’s fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded.

Critics who perceive the first level of Mann's irony recognize that the second voice is giving us reasons to be dubious about various aspects of Aschenbach's life and work. But many of them don't appreciate the second level of irony, the one exemplified in setting this narrative voice alongside the more sympathetic one, and inviting us to choose.