Hamlet Quotes

I have felt some twinges recently, about parts I wanted to play that I may be getting too old and fat to do. 'Hamlet,' for example - maybe that's gone. I would love to play Richard II.

The trap in Hamlet is he's the most passive of Shakespeare's characters. He's not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It's a lot of asides and soliloquies where he's wrapped in angst, and that's not a very interesting character.

Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.

I don't think Hamlet is mad, nor is he predisposed to be a gloomy or tragic figure.

Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense, philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense.

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.

There have been more books alone written about Hamlet than have been written about the Bible.

I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.

Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.

I've done classical theaters. I played Hamlet myself and Romeo.

I was so scared of going back to the theatre after 'Hamlet.' I didn't know if I'd do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it.

And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.

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.

You'd never play Hamlet if you started worrying about who's played it before you.

The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of 'Curses' makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of 'Hamlet' but none is planned.

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

I started to realise that it wasn't for me. Perhaps I didn't have to give my Hamlet before I died, that the world might be an OK place without my Hamlet, in fact.

I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.

Macbeth is contending with the realities of this world, Hamlet with those of the next.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

At the close of the day when the hamlet is still, and mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove, when naught but the torrent is heard on the hill, and naught but the nightingale's song in the grove.

I have no desire to play King Lear or Hamlet. I never had a grand ambition. I just followed my nose.

'Born to play? Hmmm. Probably Romeo... or Hamlet, I guess. Also, I'd be a great Alexander the Great.

I would rather play Hamlet with no rehearsal than TV golf.

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

You have to get through the Hamlet hoop as a young actor. Your classical qualifications are based on the quality of your Hamlet. And then, as an older actor, you have to get through the Lear hoop. And I'm approaching the Lear hoop.

I was doing Hamlet in the off-season, and I had a specific idea in my mind about what I wanted that character to look like, and because it's going to lead into the next year, I knew that it was going to have to be established somewhere in the show.

We want to do for 'Hamlet' what Baz Luhrmann did for 'Romeo and Juliet' in terms of like a really cool kind of re-imagining.

If I ever play Hamlet, it'll be in a dress!

What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?