I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.
As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.
People think that direct address was invented by Ferris Bueller, but in fact, it wasn't. It was invented by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.
You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.
I don't know how this company got the name National Shakespeare Company, because it was literally like retards employing retards.
While Shakespeare wasn't the first voice in the room, in North America and Europe, he's one of the loudest voices.
I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.
I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
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.
I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.
I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.
Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare.
I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.
I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.
It was an outdoor Shakespeare theater that I grew up at. That feels like home, and the place I'm always trying to figure out how to get to.
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.
It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.
There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.
In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.
I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.
I'd always vaguely expected to outgrow my limitations. One day, I'd stop twisting my hair, and wearing running shoes all the time, and eating exactly the same food every day. I'd remember my friends' birthdays, I'd learn Photoshop, I wouldn't let my daughter watch TV during breakfast. I'd read Shakespeare.
I went to drama school for three years, and the whole thing there is that hopefully you are introduced to a man called William Shakespeare who is the greatest of all time of all storytelling.
Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It's just the nature of the words he writes.
I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.
I've been with Shakespeare all my life.
I think that music is crucially important in Shakespeare - and, clearly, was an important part of the Elizabethan theatre. And, it's always been something that was a profound element of the experience of Shakespeare that I have been drawn to - and interpreters have, as well.
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.
Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
