Quotes About William Shakespeare

“William Shakespeare: Can you love a fool?
Viola De Lesseps: Can you love a player?”

— Marc Norman

“William Shakespeare: My muse, as always, is Aphrodite.
Philip Henslowe: Aphrodite Baggett, who does it behind the Dog and Crumpet?”

— Marc Norman

“William Shakespeare: I have a wife, yes, and I cannot marry the daughter of Sir Robert De Lesseps. You needed no wife come from Stratford to tell you that, and yet, you let me come to your bed.
Viola De Lesseps: Calf-love. I loved the writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.”

— Marc Norman

“Viola De Lesseps: You have never spoken so well of him before.
William Shakespeare: He was not dead before.”

— Marc Norman

“I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.' It works wonders.”

— Martin Amis

“I'm taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people. I can't help thinking that medicine is more closely aligned to the humanities than to the sciences. I can't help thinking that I could learn more about being a good doctor from William Shakespeare than I could from Isaac Newton. After all, isn't understanding people at least as important as understanding pathology?”

— Michael J. Collins

“Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.”

— Roger Ebert

“The great William Shakespeare said, "What's in a name?" He also said, "Call me Billy one more time and I will stab you with this ink quill.”

— Cuthbert Soup

“What's gone, and what's past help Should be past grief. -William Shakespeare”

— M.C. Beaton

“A twenty-minute eulogy, unless composed by a) William Shakespeare, b) Winston Churchill, or c) Mark Twain, is sixteen minutes too long. Technical note: It is better to tell a eulogist to speak for four minutes not five minutes. "Five minutes" to the modern ear sounds like "around five minutes," whereas "four minutes" means "four minutes.”

— Christopher Buckley

“Let me leave you with a positive thought. William Shakespeare once wrote: "The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite." They call this the Hidden Economy and it is not based on greed or love of money, but on unconditional, selfless, boundless and unstinting Love.”

— Etienne De L'Amour

“William Shakespeare ... was baptized on April 26, 1564. When he was born is disputed, but anyone who argues that it was after this date is just being difficult.”

— Richard Armour

“Wisely and slow. They stumble that ran fast. - William Shakespeare”

— Kasey Michaels

“Good or bad is a matter of perspective. I met an immortal hunami once, a man called William Shakespeare, who wrote that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

— Michael Scott

“Come not between the dragon and his wrath. -William Shakespeare King Lear”

— Matthew Reilly

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first. William Shakespeare.”

— Lisi Harrison

“So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying then. -WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE”

— J.D. Robb

“When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man-whoever he was.”

— Bill Bryson

“Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare.”

— Bill Bryson

“If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623-the famous First Folio.”

— Bill Bryson

“In memory of Jim Heacock "In thy face I see the map of honor, truth, and loyalty." -William Shakespeare Henry VI, Part III”

— Tess Gerritsen

“Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it's the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we're actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not.”

— James Lee Burke

“All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“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.”

— Hayley Atwell

“William Shakespeare was a brilliant writer and he only wrote the truth. So, if I don't believe it, I have to work really hard to see what that truth is so that I do; that's the only way I can make it believable for the audience.”

— Condola Rashad

“The media love coarse debate because coarse debate drives ratings and ratings generate profits. Unless the TV producer happens to be William Shakespeare, an argument is more interesting than a soliloquy - and there will never be a shortage of people willing to argue on TV.”

— John Sununu

“Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.”

— Nicholas. Sparks

“Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragic play written early in the career of William Shakespeare about two teenage "star-cross'd lovers" whose untimely deaths ultimately unite their feuding households. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal "young lovers". (From Wikipedia)”

— Jane Austen

“Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare. Sparks also said his novels are like Greek Tragedies. This may actually be true. I can't check it out because, tragically, no really bad Greek tragedies have survived.”

— Roger Ebert

“There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.”

— Harold Bloom

“I'm one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn't do Shakespeare ... The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.”

— Nicolas Cage

“I've done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I'm not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.”

— Rhys Ifans

“William Shakespeare put it this way, Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.”

— Earl Nightingale

“I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book. -William Shakespeare, The Tempest”

— Lev Grossman

“And Prometheus was flying directly toward them.
William Shakespeare shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Now, I've never been a warrior,and I know little about tactics,but shouldn't we be flying in the other direction?" They were close enough now to see the wide-eyed anpu in the nearest craft.
"We will," Prometheus said. "Just as soon as the missiles explode."
"Which missiles?" Shakespeare asked.
"The two just behind us.”

— Michael Scott

“Nothing in this world is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. -WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE”

— Kerry Patterson

“Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love. -William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost”

— Cassandra Clare

“O,speak to me no more;these words like daggers enter my ears.(a fancy way of saying SHUT UP!)"
- William Shakespeare "hamlet”

— William Shakespeare

“Fairies, black, grey, green, and white,
You moonshine revellers, and shades of night,
You orphan heirs of fixed destiny,
Attend your office and your quality.
William Shakespeare”

— William Shakespeare

“There is flattery in friendship - William Shakespeare”

— William Shakespeare

“Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech. Ben Jonson and he did gather humors of men daily wherever they came.”

— John Aubrey

“In the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.”

— Mary Ruefle

“The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.”

— Marilynne Robinson

“I understand that each one of us works at a different speed, and has a slightly different process. I understand that these writers are painstaking, wanting each sentence-each word-to carry weight ... I know it's not laziness, but respect for the work, and I understand from my own work that haste makes waste. But I also understand that life is short, and that in the end, none of us is prolific. The creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn't produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell.”

— Stephen King

“A new report claims that William Shakespeare was a marijuana user and may have been high when he wrote some of his plays. Which explains that one line: 'To be, or not to be ... Wait, what was the question?'”

— Jimmy Fallon

“And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Dylan is so brilliant. To me, he makes William Shakespeare look like Billy Joel.”

— George Harrison

“I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.”

— Richard Dawkins

“I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.”

— Kurt Vonnegut