Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom

Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings.
Vanessa Redgrave

Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
Edward Hall

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.
Brendan Behan

Shakespeare said, nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.
Dyan Cannon

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
Howard Nemerov

Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course, foreseen.
Andrew Coyle Bradley

Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote.
H. C. Bunner

Shakespeare was not meant for taverns, nor for tavern louts.
Samuel G. Engel

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
Eugene Ionesco

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.
Harold Bloom

Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.
Leonard Maltin

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.
Lloyd Alexander

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.
Alex Cox

Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.
Andrew Coyle Bradley

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
George Byron

Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one's place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea - one swims where one wants.
Vivien Leigh

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
Trevor Nunn

Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much.
Basil Rathbone

Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
Mandy Patinkin