Joss Whedon Quotes

With Shakespeare, because you invest so much time in working on material, it always sort of stays with you to some degree.

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

'Macbeth' was the first play I ever read. In fact, I remember my brother Tom, who is six years older than me, coming home from school and telling me about it. He was the one that really got me going.

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

Before acting, I was always attracted to words, to literature - be they the words of Williams, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare or Moliere.

London theatre is different: it is a commercial theatre that brings the whole of society into one place. And Shakespeare grasped, better than anyone else, what it means to engage the entire audience.

It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.

Shakespeare is rich and beautiful, and it can be an amazing experience to read and to watch and to work on.

As a child, I was fascinated by the stories of Dickens acting out everything in front of the mirror as he wrote it down. Later, when you approach his work as an actor, you notice how sayable the dialogue is.

With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.

I saw 'Othello' at the National Theatre in London, and it was so stunning. I was so moved. It's beautiful.

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

Acting has changed since the nineteen-forties.

If you can read, then you can recite Shakespeare. But that's not acting.

Watching and learning from the great Josette Bushell-Mingo, who was playing Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra at the time, and then to return to the same stage six months later playing a lead role, was incredible - I fell in love with the poetry and the breadth of the language so much that I didn't want it to end.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare over the years. You start to realise how the plays fit together; he's always using pieces from one and slotting them into others.

It blows my mind that you get Shakespeare where the 'low' comedy characters have got Northern or Welsh accents.

Unlike films, theatre allows you to experiment as an actor, which is fulfilling.

I studied as an actor at the theatre conservatoire in Quebec, but by the time I got to my third year, I was more interested in directing. There's more to it than helping actors get round a stage: it's a wonderful way of telling stories.

I have realised acting is my heartbeat and my lifeline.

I am always excited to be an actor. If I wasn't, I would be acting, and the audience wouldn't watch me.

I'd love to play Constance in 'King John' or Paulina in 'The Winter's Tale.' I'd like to go on working till I drop.

When you are an actor you are a very small part of a very large scheme of things.

For me, acting is an art.

When I was younger, I acted in some Shakespeare stuff; I did one Shakespeare camp.