Top 1200 Reading Shakespeare Quotes & Sayings

Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.

Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.

An extraordinary and controversial interpretation of Shakespeare's origins, which certainly provokes much thought. A radical analysis of Shakespeare's text, leading to a conclusion which is bound to amaze the reader and the scholar. Who was Shakespeare?

The reason that I'm a writer today is because of Shakespeare and falling in love with Shakespeare when I was 8. That was through the movies, actually - through Olivier's 'Hamlet.' That was the first thing that got me to fall in love with Shakespeare and movies and everything in one big preadolescent rush.

I wasn't a model schoolboy. Of course, I was forced to sit through Shakespeare and I really got into some of it, though it depended on who was reading it out.

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters.

A lot of people have a fear of Shakespeare. Even actors do. People are like, "Oh, I won't go and see Shakespeare because the language is so hard," but it is. When you read it on the page, you go, "What?! What does that mean?!" If you go to a Shakespeare play and you've never been, you sit there and go, "I'm an idiot! I don't get it!"

Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare as a young man; I was involved with Shakespeare and Company.

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

I'd read Shakespeare in school, translated into isiXhosa, and loved the stories, but I hadn't realised before I started reading the English text how powerful the language was - the great surging speeches Othello has.

I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.

In school I really loved Shakespeare, and I participated in a country-wide Shakespeare competition.

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting.

I was reading everything under the sun from music history to feminist literature to Shakespeare, which is why I'm not a complete idiot at this time.

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.

Working on Shakespeare and learning about Shakespeare was the big takeaway for me.

Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.

One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.

I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare. I actually want to do this Shakespeare play in New York, but I think it's interesting that there's this gaping hole in the repertoire in the American theater, which is Shakespeare. It's hardly ever done, compared to how often it's done in other companies, not just Britain. Someone from the Roundabout Theater Company - I said, "You never do Shakespeare." And he said, "Yes, we're not very good at it." And I thought, "What a terrible thing to say.".

When I was doing Shakespeare and I had spent a lot of time and effort in trying to become a great Shakespearean actress. That was how I started my career, was in the theater doing Shakespeare. And my ambition was to be a great classical actress. That was what I wanted more than anything. So, I really pursued that in the first four years of my career. And it was an uphill struggle. It really was. Shakespeare's difficult and Shakespeare in a big theater is even more difficult. So, anyway, it was a struggle for me.

Unlike most readers in Antiquity who read their books aloud, we have developed the convention of reading silently. This lets us read more widely but often less well, especially when what we are reading-such as the plays of Shakespeare and Holy Scripture-is a body of oral material that has been, almost but not quite accidentally, captured in a book like a fly in amber.

All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.

I'm a huge Dirty Dancing fan. I feel like I should be reading [William] Shakespeare, but I'm watching Baby not be in a corner.

I think working on Shakespeare was a big part of my time at drama school. I'm so glad that I got to know Shakespeare and got a chance to play great parts in Shakespeare, because it really teaches you - or taught me, anyway - everything.

Shakespeare is still Shakespeare because story rules.

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

I wasnt a model schoolboy. Of course, I was forced to sit through Shakespeare and I really got into some of it, though it depended on who was reading it out.

I wouldn't call myself a modern Shakespeare, but Shakespeare was probably to his generation what I am to mine.

In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.'

I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean - not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.

Shakespeare language is fantastic, and to be honest, you don't need to do anything to Shakespeare.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare's.

"With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart" once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.

Shakespeare language is fantastic, and to be honest, you dont need to do anything to Shakespeare.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

One of things I'd love to do one day is a Shakespeare with Trevor Nunn. I've done musicals with him, but never Shakespeare. There's no one better.

My dad is a retired Shakespeare professor, my mother a retired classicist. Suffice to say I grew up in a house full of books, where reading was encouraged if not required.

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

Not Shakespeare. In college I took a Shakespeare class because I was an English major, and they had a Summer program called Shakespeare at Winedale, which is out in the German Hill country in Texas , where you go out and live for two months and then you perform three plays at the end of that time.

We hope the Bell Shakespeare Company will become an indigenous part of the Globe Shakespeare Centre in Australia.

Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.

I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.

I'd like to do a piece of Shakespeare. Any upcoming Shakespeare film. Just a bit to say I did a classic.

People say that the Bible is a boring book...but they don't say that about Shakespeare, because the people who teach Shakespeare are zealous for Shakespeare.

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