Top 1200 Reading Shakespeare Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I grew up in a theater family. My father was a regional theater classical repertory producer. He created Shakespeare festivals. He produced all of Shakespeare's plays, mostly in Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. One of them, the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, is still going. So I grew up not wanting to be an actor, not wanting to go into the family business.

I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

I read everything by Ian McEwan, he is so elegant. I love reading anything about Shakespeare, too. He is my first love. If I had a time machine, I would be hanging out with him.

The stage can be defined as a place where Shakespeare murdered Hamlet and a great many Hamlets murdered Shakespeare.

If we weren't doing remakes, nobody would know who Shakespeare was. I'm not saying that RoboCop is Shakespeare, but it's a way we're retelling. That's what we do as human beings. We retell our favorite stories.

T. Ray said 'Who do you think you are? Julias Shakespeare?' The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival.

From the early days of the Raj, Shakespeare had been woven into the fabric of India's education, and my father understood that in a culture rich with storytelling and fantastical tales, Shakespeare's characters and storylines resonated in a powerful way.

My personal view is that reading has to be balanced. Obviously, there's a certain amount of reading that we have to do academically to continue to learn and to grow, but it's got to be balanced with fun and with elective reading. Whether that's comic books or Jane Austen, if it makes you excited about reading, that's what matters.

When Shakespeare doesn't feel like Shakespeare, it's the best.

In many ways, 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' is modeled on Shakespeare's Henry V, which relied on a chorus to explain in words the battles of Harfleur and Agincourt that could never be captured on the Elizabethan stage.

A popular speaker, however unpopular and insignificant, has only to wind up his speech with half-a-dozen lines of Shakespeare (and to make it clearly understood that they are Shakespeare's) and he will sit down amid thunders of applause.

I feel I understand now why, whenever there are revolutions, Shakespeare is what people turn to. Because whenever a society is on the cusp, about to become something else, they find themselves in Shakespeare.

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Some of the finest Shakespeare has been done recently by college theater programs. I'll tell you what these young kids have: They have a natural authority in Shakespeare. They feel a right to do it. And once they honor the humanity of it, the rhythm of the verse comes with it.

When I was young, there was no such thing as YA. You simply went from reading children's novels to reading adult novels. So one year, I was reading Tove Jansson, and the next year, I was reading Stephen King.

I think reading a room - reading the personalities, reading body language - is kind of a lost art.

If you are an atheist as I am, Shakespeare can be your ideal. Everything is within Shakespeare, especially in his 10 greatest plays. They have life, meaning, understanding, the whole lot.

There have only been two authentic geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare and I think you'd better put Shakespeare first, darling.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare's rubbish.

Because I was writing verse, my instructor suggested I study Shakespeare. The Shakespeare teacher insisted you couldn't understand the text without seeing it on its feet.

Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?

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.

I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn't because we didn't like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.

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.

I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.

In Shakespeare the birds sing, the bushes are clothed with green, hearts love, souls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes, forests and multitudes speak, the vast eternal dream hovers over all. Sap and blood, all forms of the multiple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions, diamonds and pearls, dung-hills and charnelhouses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of comers and goers, all, all are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare.

I believe strongly in what John Keats called negative capability: the trait or practice that allows a poet to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. For Keats, William Shakespeare exemplified negative capability, and I do think it's extraordinary that for all the thousands of pages Shakespeare left behind, we really don't know much about Shakespeare's own personality or opinions.

I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting. It was a lot of work - anything other than Shakespeare was less work. I had a lot of interesting roles, but I don't point to them and say, "That was more interesting than that," because I don't know what the criteria are.

I went to a Jesuit school and they did a William Shakespeare play every year. I got to know Shakespeare as parts I wanted to play. I missed out on playing Ophelia - it was an all-boys school. The younger boys used to play the girls, I played Lady Anne in Richard III and Lady Macbeth, then Richard II and Malvolio. I just became a complete Shakespeare nut, really.

A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.

One year at the SAG Awards, somebody practically knocked me over, and it was Helen Mirren. She was like, 'Oh my God - is it really you? I'm your biggest fan.' I was like, 'Wait, aren't you supposed to be home reading Shakespeare or something?'

There's a remarkable power about reading together, reading collectively, that's brought out by reading groups.

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end.

I learned from master teachers at the University of Evansville, at Juilliard, at Shakespeare festivals all over the country, eventually landing at Shakespeare in the Park in N.Y.C. That show transferred, so I got to make my Broadway debut doing 'The Tempest' with Patrick Stewart.

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

The great thing about reading for Quentin [Tarantino] is you're not reading for him, he's reading with you. So he sits right next to you.

But in reading Shakespeare and in reading about Edward de Vere, it's quite apparent that when you read these works that whoever penned this body of work was firstly well-travelled, secondly a multi-linguist and thirdly someone who had an innate knowledge of the inner workings and the mechanisms of a very secret and paranoid Elizabethan court. Edward de Vere ticks those three boxes and many more. William of Stratford gave his wife a bed when he died [his second best bed].

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.

Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets;Jonson was theVirgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.

Often in America people would assume that [as an English actor] you've had some sort of deep, classical training, or that you're a Shakespeare enthusiast. I have zero interest in me performing Shakespeare.

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there's the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare.

Once an actor told me he went to the Shakespeare School of Acting, and I said, 'I went to the Shakespeare of Acting, too' and he said, 'Oh really?' And I said, 'I went to Shakespeare Elementary School in Chicago.' He didn't take the joke well, he didn't laugh and didn't think it was funny - I thought it was funny. It's all the same to me.

Teenagers are always sneaking around in drawers where they shouldn't go and reading things they shouldn't be reading. And that's an attempt to try, I think, to penetrate, that's how I found out as a teenager what was going on, was by sneaking into drawers and reading letters that I had no business reading.

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

When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don't have a very wonderful history at the box office.

Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

Until I was a junior in high school, I was a "boy scientist" type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

It's easier to do Shakespeare than Spelling, and I know that sounds crazy, because the challenge of Shakespeare is living up to Shakespeare, living up to that word, not failing, you know, where with Aaron Spelling it's like, just try to look good. Or maybe don't use Spelling there, that's bad. No - you can. He's dead.

And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.

I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. 'Lamb's Tales' from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury.' These two books, and the 'Everyman' edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth.

I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.