Minnie Maddern Fiske Quotes

I'm not in the advertising business, but I think it would be very nice if people went to see the film Hamlet, because it was made with love and integrity.

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

Being a theater actor, I've done a lot of plays where I've seen someone else play the same role in another production. Especially with the classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams.

I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.

There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist. ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Oh, if Shakespeare says it, that's all right.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

Select only things to steal that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent

There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game. I don't know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art's the same way.

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.

Or maybe I’d lost my soul already. I doubted God let someone like me keep any gift from him. It was highly likely I’d been born without one.

Yes, well, let me tell you that if nobody had ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld. I bet you I don't know ten souls who read him without a middleman.

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

Books worth reading are worth re-reading.

Mostly, I hope that by having some fun with Shakespeare's style I'll encourage young people who are intimidated by Shakespeare to give him a try.

I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century.

Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.