Quotes on Shakespeare

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.

I don't make any distinction between a popular TV series or blockbuster film and doing Shakespeare. They're different, but as long as the material is good and the intention is honourable, it's all the same to me.

I believe kids shouldn't be taught Shakespeare. They should experience it first by seeing a great production.

Anybody who tells a very big lie is paid attention to. If you say, 'Shakespeare could not write. He was illiterate,' everybody says, 'Well, what do you know that we don't?' That's what Trump does all the time.

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.

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.

We're very lucky, men, that there are these fabulous parts. Women - once you've done all the parts in Shakespeare, they start running out. So you can pick and choose and find something to energise you.

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

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.