A lot of London's image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a Shakespearean London, or a swinging London.
A. A. Gill
Israel is too attached to America, too influenced by America. It should be connected to Europe. America is based on mythology - the free man, the individual, the open frontier. Europe is more conscious of history. Take Britain and Shakespeare. You shape your identity through history.
A. B. Yehoshua
In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
A. S. Byatt
In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
The rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of life. I think that's especially true of Shakespeare.
Aaron Sorkin
Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.
Aaron Yoo
Britney Spears was an incredible dancer. That kid was amazing.
Abby Lee Miller
I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.
Adam Mansbach
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.
Ajay Naidu
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
Shakespeare's plays are more violent than 'Scarface.'
Al Pacino
There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare's.
I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
Doing Shakespeare once is not fair to the play. I have been in Shakespeare plays when it's not until the last two or three performances when I even understand certain things. In the old days star actors would travel the world doing the same parts over and over again.
Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.
Alan Arkin
You'll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.
Alan Cumming
For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here.
I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare.
The thing I'd really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare's Globe. I'd like to walk along that. Don't worry, I won't get drunk and fall in.
Alan Davies
Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.
Alanis Morissette
I'm inspired by Divine certainly, oh, and Britney Spears. I look exactly like her.
Well, I love Britney Spears, and I condider myself to be Britney Spears.
I had an artistic streak and was good at painting and drawing and also very good at English, but I did want to be a scientist. The education system means you have to choose physics or Shakespeare. It can't be both.
I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.
The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king.
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.
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.
I would have loved to have a role in the HBO series 'Deadwood.' It was Shakespeare in the Old West.
How should a man be capable of grooming his own horse, or of furbishing his own spear and helmet, if he allows himself to become unaccustomed to tending even his own person, which is his most treasured belonging?
While Shakespeare wasn't the first voice in the room, in North America and Europe, he's one of the loudest voices.
I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.
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.
By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor in classics like Shaw and Shakespeare and Chekov and Ibsen.
I wasn't a musical-theater kid. We went to plays at school and took field trips to see Shakespeare. And that really sparked that fire for me, and so that's still going, and I haven't given up on it.
When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.
Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.
Shakespeare did not consider himself the legislator of mankind. He faithfully records man's problems and does not evidently propose to solve them.
Shakespeare's naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness.
I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare's rubbish.
It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.
You know, I look at Britney Spears who can't even drive without paparazzi in her face, and if I ever get to that level, which I don't expect, but if it does happen and success does happen to come my way, then I'm going to be prepared.
With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.
In a recent Valentine's Day posting on her fan website, Britney Spears says that - oh, who cares?
Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.
I've never read it because I'd like to see one Shakespeare play that I don't know what happens. I close my ears and hum whenever I hear anything about 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre.'
I started out doing a lot of theater, a lot of Shakespeare, classic plays.
Shakespeare is definitely my first love.
Shakespeare was the thing that started me off on that train, you know, and every one of his plays. There are so many different characters, and the wonderful thing about being in an all-girls school was I got to play them all, you know. So I got to play Mercutio and Oberon and Malvolio - it was great.
