Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.

Good directors say, Here's where the play is. They stand by the heart of the matter. Some of them stand beside it.

I don't think playing a villain is my greatest talent.

Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.

There is no problem that is not improved by effort, and no effort that is too paltry to be worth undertaking.

I came to New York in 1962 and it began to look like I might he able to make a living in 1972.

As for lawyers, it's more fun to play one than to be one.

If there's any business that instructs you in the strong hand of fate, it's show business. You can plan and plan, but it's what happens to you that really determines what your career will be like.

I've always done what I thought was good if I could live on what they were offering-and sometimes if I couldn't. So even when I was broke, my career didn't lack for interest.

I think the bait for doing something really is always the part.

Obviously the first roles that you're proud of are the ones that everybody else liked too.

If you're going to be born ugly and be an actor - the least they can do is let you play Lincoln.

I literally was saved by a role, from becoming a cab driver. I never did have to wait tables, though, so looking back I guess I had it pretty soft.

If I have to be typecast, I'd like it to be as Abraham Lincoln.

I enjoy listening to opera at home, occasionally, but I would much rather see it than just listen to it.

I got a note from my father, who said that Success is wonderful, if you don't inhale. That was his own aphorism, and I think it's the very best thing he could have said to me or anyone else on the subject.

I'm sort of obsessed with the news. That is a syndrome. But I don't watch a whole lot of TV.

The bad guys don't always get punished and the good guys are not necessarily pure.

I've been able to do things that allow me to hold my head up and still be popular.

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.

It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

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.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

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.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.

I do think that, for instance, we've been very lucky to have theatrical careers and be associated with Shakespeare which sometimes gives you a kind of bogus kudos.

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.

But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

I've never done anything for money. My first love is things of limited commercial appeal. I could be happy doing Shakespeare for the rest of my life.

An actor should be ready to play any role within reason. For example, I think the most ridiculous thing for me to do would be to try and play Shakespeare.

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.

Most people don't know that I am an accomplished dramatic actor... But I've performed in several Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, except in this version, Hamlet lives in an apartment with two women, and has to pretend he's gay so that the landlord won't evict him.

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

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.

You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

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

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.

How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.