Sam Wanamaker Quotes

At the roots, people are still people. That's why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.

Ultimately, a timeless story has to be about the human condition.

Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven't really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now - people were the same then, too - that's what's so wonderful and powerful.

Shakespeare - I was very influenced - still am - by Shakespeare. I couldn't believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

The human heart is the same the world over.

I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality - I mean, we're all very inconsistent in the way we behave.

The most valuable writers are those in whom we find not themselves, or ourselves, or the fugitive era of their lifetimes, but the common vision of all times.

In a non-supernatural universe, there's just character, and it's humanity and human beings and how they relate to each other.

I think so many of the themes from the natural world mimic emotional themes in our lives.

Universal human characteristics are a good base for great art.

No matter who we are, no matter what our circumstances, our feelings and emotions are universal.

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

When it comes to emotions, we all feel pain in the same way, everyone, whether you're from Istanbul or Beijing.

Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought; within which were all the tides and waves of destiny and will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambition and revenge; upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and death and all the sunlight of content and love, and within which was the inverted sky lit with the eternal stars -- an intellectual ocean -- toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought receive their dew and rain.

We humans...are seriously flawed. The things that are the most necessary, the most critical to us, are the things we take most for granted. Air. Water. Love. If you have someone to love, you are lucky. If they love you back, you're blessed. And if you waste the time you have to love them, you're a fool. -The Christmas List- p. 296

Could you really love someone who was capable of falling in love with somebody else?

Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss.

It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.

The reason we constantly discover new truth in Shakespeare is that his complete understanding of the particular includes the universal.

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.

Man is but a network of relationships and these alone matter to him.

It doesn't matter, that's the point. It doesn't matter that things don't always work exactly the way you thought they should. Moments matter. People matter, how they feel, how they connect. Who they are alone and together. All that matters, no matter how quickly the moment passes. Maybe because it passes.