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

Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.'
Geoffrey Rush

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

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
Robert Browning

The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
Kenneth Branagh

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.
Colin Firth

The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king.
Alex Cox

The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.
Michael Tippett

The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.
Montgomery Clift

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
Marshall McLuhan

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
Robert Graves

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
Stephen Greenblatt

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.
Vanessa Redgrave