Shakespearean Literature Quotes

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

I love William Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That's some serious ghetto expletive. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff.

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.

I'm just having a wonderful time. It's an interesting thing that I'm very comfortable with this material and I don't know why. Maybe it's because I did MacBeth.

Though he had very little Latin beyond "Cave canem," he had, as a young dog, devoured Shakespeare (in a tasty leather binding).

Come my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession.

I had a very bad first experience of Shakespeare at school, and, now I'm determined to put that wrong right and just make Shakespeare as vivid and live as possible.

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

The first time I ever acted was in 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and my first line was, 'I didn't know Shakespeare had a sister.'

When I was in junior high, I would carry around this huge volume of Shakespeare. I just like the romantic vibe. I write about it because I fall in and out of love quite a bit. I was always pulling on my mother’s heartstrings to get more love.

I started out in the theater, and my background is classical. I'd love to be in a film version of a Shakespeare play.

I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

When Xena finished I just really wanted to work with Shakespeare's material.

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

For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here.

Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.

I was causing trouble in high school, and in order to get me to stop and to pass, they put me into theater, and I ended up winning a Shakespeare competition. All I had to do was imitate people properly, and I ended up going to the finals when I was about 16.

I love Lucille Ball. But you don't call that Shakespeare. It's just entertainment, you know. And if you like that, then go have a ball, have fun.

Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more, men were deceivers ever

I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.

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

I've hated poetry ever since I was at school. I include Shakespeare in that. I don't understand the obsession with him!

Every time we moved on, I joined a different class in a different school with different girls until, aged 13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school altogether. Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich language of Shakespeare's plays at which, by then, I was something of an old hand.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

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