Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.
I think it's sad that movies and television have caused the theatre to fade as a popular art form. I hope to get young people into the theatre and expose them to Shakespeare.
There's been a kind of inverse snobbery about culture. I get the feeling some people would look at Shakespeare and say, that's a bit too intimidating for working-class people.
I got an M.F.A. in acting from NYU, and part of our training is to learn how to use swords in combat situations in a performance and Shakespeare plays where you have to fight.
When I was 19, I took a train from Houston to New York, and I had in my lap the collected works of William Shakespeare. The play I read on that journey was 'Titus Andronicus.'
Writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone's favorite galaxy far, far away.
I'm constantly intimidated by Shakespeare's work. Trying to decipher what he's saying and holding on to that thought - not just as an actor, but as a human being - is a rigour.
From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.
Shakespeare has been adapted by Akira Kurosawa. 'Dangerous Liaisons' has been adapted into a Chinese movie. 'Blood Simple', the Coen brothers movie, was adapted by Zhang Yimou.
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.
'Star Wars' is mythology. It's like Greek mythology or Shakespeare. It's the story of good versus evil over a very long span of time. The storytelling is universal and timeless.
I've never read it because I'd like to see one Shakespeare play that I don't know what happens. I close my ears and hum whenever I hear anything about 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre.'
The language can be different, but the emotional lives are the same no matter whether you're doing Shakespeare or Stoppard or something else... The emotional life is all the same.
I joined the Royal Shakespeare Co. with no experience whatsoever - I'd never been to a drama school or anything. But I was strong and could lift things, I could move scenery about.
I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.
I think you have lots of actors who would much rather do a wonderful part at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but then you have to take a two-line part in a TV thing to pay the bills.
And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don't always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I'm at a restaurant, I'll think, 'Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?'
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 gives you these clues - these little pieces of gold dust, I call them. They tell you so much about the story, the character, the drive, the intentions. It's like a gift.
I enjoy doing martial arts films, but I like the straight stuff, too. I'd like to go back and do some Shakespeare, and maybe knock out a play or two. It's all about keeping balance.
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.
We need to take a far more active role in love than 'Romeo and Juliet' would lead us to believe. Perhaps that's what Shakespeare's saying, in a way. We can't leave it all up to fate.
I went to college at San Francisco State and supported myself working the graveyard shift at a brewery and did a little theater. It was great. I'd do Shakespeare and stuff like that.
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
I think that Shakespeare himself raided fairy tales and chronicle writers, and he always looked to people who worked in the mythic genres, whether it was folk tales or popular novels.
Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
James Agate, a great critic of the day, advised me that the way to learn your job properly was to learn Shakespeare, so I went to Stratford. It really sorts out the men from the boys.
In Jaipur, I did almost everything from regional theatre to Shakespeare's plays. But when I shifted to Mumbai, I joined Anupam Kher's academy, Actor Prepares,to hone my acting skills.
I actually grew up seeing a lot of classical theater - a lot of Shakespeare - but I have such a passion for music and find that way of telling a story to be really compelling as well.
I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.
I found that the more I'd done Shakespeare, and the more I trusted my instincts and applied the same rules you would apply to any scene, the closer I got to how it's meant to be acted.
At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.
Although I have been doing plays since I was 8 years old, it was only when I started doing Shakespeare at age 19 at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival that I felt like my career started.
My father used to act in high school. He was in a production of 'Othello;' I don't know who he played, but it wasn't Othello. He would talk about it, though, and read Shakespeare to me.
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.
People go to see Shakespeare plays over and over, not because the story is new, but because they want to see how a certain actor will perform in a role that is familiar to the audience.
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.
We studied so much Shakespeare in drama school and I'd like to go back to that. I'd really throw myself into something that would probably petrify me. Tennessee Williams. Something juicy.
Because when you're in drama school, you're playing multiple characters at once. You know, in the morning you're doing a Chekhov play, and then you're doing a Shakespeare workshop midday.
I was a musical theater major at the University of Arizona. And I primarily trained with Marsha Bagwell. It was a classical program, so we did Chekov and Moliere and a lot of Shakespeare.
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.
The leading character isn't always the most important or interesting character; when people think that the protagonist is the character portrayed, it's people who haven't read Shakespeare.
When 'Deadwood' came along, it was totally like Shakespeare. The long speeches were like soliloquies. If one phrase of a monologue was out of whack, the entire one-page speech didn't work.
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.
I had always wanted to retell a Shakespeare play. It was an ambition from college days. But in order to be able to do it... the circumstances in my life didn't come together for a long time.