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

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.
Trevor Nunn

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
Alexis de Tocqueville

There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them.
Kenneth Branagh

There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.
Ian Hart

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.
Terri Windling

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf

This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.
Mark Akenside

To date or not to date that is the question. It's almost as important as Shakespeare's to be or not to be which deals with death.
Al Goldstein

To judge therefore of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rule is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country who acted under those of another.
Elizabeth Montagu

To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
Lukas Foss