Harriet Walter Quotes

I think with Shakespeare you can be required to do absolutely anything at the turn of a sixpence - suddenly you go into a battle, suddenly you utter something passionate.

Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

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?

There's a specificity of language that's required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with - a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools.

I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.

Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.

'Macbeth' sags in act four - the England scene with Malcolm and Macduff just doesn't work theatrically. But with 'Hamlet,' although the play is so long, Shakespeare manages to sustain the arc.

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.

I feel like Shakespeare is so epic, in a way that sci-fi genre stuff is epic, it transcends the mundane, and it takes you to this place of real passion and real beauty.

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

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

All the world's not a stage.

In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme.

The poetry of speech.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

...my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.

What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

That music in itself, whose sounds are song, The poetry of speech.

The mirror is the mother dew, the book of desiccated twilights, echo become flesh.