Shakespeare Richard The Third Quotes & Sayings

Why I, in this weak piping time of piece,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on my own deformity :
... — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is God, of course. I have studied his plays for the vast majority of my sentient life. When I was a kid, my parents found an old copy of the LP recording of Richard Burton in John Gielgud's Broadway production of Hamlet and they gave it to me for my birthday. I listened to it till the grooves wore thin and I was off and running. — Ken Ludwig

When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster. — Kevin Spacey

You have but mistook me all the while ... I live by bread like you, taste grief, feel want, need friends. Conditioned thus how can you call me king? — William Shakespeare

All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me — Eugene Ionesco

Shakespeare villains were extraordinary. Macbeth, Iago, Richard III ... They're so richly layered that a British actor would find it almost impossible to create a two-dimensional villain, if he's explored in his early years or continues to explore his Shakespearean heritage. You can almost not judge them, if they're played really well. — Ben Kingsley

LADY ANNE:
Villain, thou know'st nor law of God nor man:
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.
RICHARD, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER:
But I know none, and therefore am no beast.
LADY ANNE:
O wonderful, when devils tell the troth!
RICHARD, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER:
More wonderful, when angels are so angry. — William Shakespeare

And therefore, - since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days. — William Shakespeare

When I read 'Paradise Lost,' or 'Richard III,' it is clear that Milton and Shakespeare took real pleasure and satisfaction from creating these epitomes of evil. — Marilynne Robinson

The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT. Richard Bausch — Kathy Fish

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English. — Richard Flanagan

The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study. — Peter Ackroyd

Doing Shakespeare on stage with Kenneth Branagh, I don't think it gets better than that. — Richard Madden

What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history.
(In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III') — Paul Murray Kendall

But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out. — Walter Scott

There is in our society a gulf opening up, a kind of cultural apartheid, between those who are brought up to feel our national culture is theirs, to take ownership of it, and enjoy the privileges of that, and those who are completely disfranchised, those - for example - who will never be taken to the theatre to see Shakespeare. — Richard Eyre

Folly is
so human that it has common roots with poetry and tragedy; it is
revealed as much in the insane asylum as in the writings of a
Cervantes or a Shakespeare, or in the deep psychological insights
and cries of revolt of a Nietzsche. — Richard Howard

By the apostle Paul, shadows tonight Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers. — William Shakespeare

GLOUCESTER. Madam, my mother, I do cry you mercy;I did not see your Grace. Humbly on my knee I crave your blessing.
DUCHESS. God bless thee; and put meekness in thy breast,love, charity, obedience, and true duty!
GLOUCESTER. Amen! [Aside] And make me die a good old man! That is the butt end of a mother's blessing; I marvel that her Grace did leave it out. — William Shakespeare

Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou, Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war, felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tartary. — William Shakespeare

The thing that is always so surprising about plays written in another century is how remarkably elastic they are. When you listen to the way in which Shakespeare attacks relationships, for example, even though the words may start off sounding foreign, in actuality they are so accessible, the motivations so clear, the resonances so contemporary. When you put it in a modern context - we could well be in a place with someone like Gaddafi or Mubarak - it becomes apparent how Richard III resonates with that type of personality, with media and manipulation, alliances and petty jealousies. — Kevin Spacey

I don't think I have had a big break, although joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1986 opened up new horizons. — Richard McCabe

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast. — William Shakespeare

Deep malice makes too deep incision. Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed.
Richard 11, Act 1, Scene 1 — William Shakespeare

How would it alter Juliet's love perception to learn the sea is but a rounded jug of water? Would her sensuous analogy turned simple simile unveil to her the limits of herself? Or would she forget the ocean, that deplorable casket, and turn on the true bottomless tumbler, the only running tap: the sky? It may have lost the title 'heavens' when its gods were dethroned, but its infinity reigns. So long as you walk, it reigns. So long as I talk and you listen, there's a voice and ears to keep it active, moving, and reason to say: look! infinity lives. And when we and the other consciousnesses pass, though it in part dies with us, still it reigns. It will, in a sense, plod on, like a lifeless coffin through its own space, sails set for nothing, unstoppable when trailing its fabric. — Richard Ronald Allan

Some sins do bear their privilege on earth,
And so doth yours: your fault was not your folly;
Needs must you lay your heart at his dispose,
Subjected tribute to commanding love,
Against whose fury and unmatched force
The aweless lion could not wage the fight
Nor keep his princely heart from Richard's hand. — William Shakespeare

RICHARD PLANTAGENET, DUKE OF YORK:
Let them obey that knows not how to rule. — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare, who never could think up a plot by himself, found this one [Macbeth] in Holinshed's Chronicles, changing it just enough so that no one would recognize the source. He didn't count on the resourcefulness of modern scholars, who have to discover things like this to become associate professors. — Richard Armour

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. — Richard Russo

Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker. — Richard Dawkins