Top 60 Macbeth Quotes

The most likely explanation is the most practical. ‘Macbeth’ is a very popular play with audiences. If you want to sell out a theater, just mount a production of ‘Macbeth’. It’s a short play, it’s an exciting play, it’s easy to understand, and it attracts great acting.

After making my stage debut aged nine as Macduff’s small son in ‘Macbeth,’ I had played a number of parts, from ‘Twelfth Night’s Viola to ‘The Merchant Of Venice’s Portia’.

I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play – ‘Othello,’ ‘Julius Caesar,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Hamlet’ – and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.

Maybe because I’m a nice and sweet person in life, I like the darker roles. The really dark one is Lady Macbeth.

I want to play King Lear, Macbeth, Benedict, Coriolanus. I wouldn’t mind doing Hamlet again. Well, I’m a little old. Perhaps I can rub Vaseline on the audience’s eyes.

My thirties were ruined by being pregnant. I loved my babies but I had been quite successful before I had them, playing Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler, one of my favourite roles.

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.

I was in theater school playing Lady Macbeth and doing these great dramatic parts, and then I got out into the real world and was auditioning for commercials, and just not getting to do anything that felt remotely meaningful.

When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, ‘I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.’ I wouldn’t have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a surgeon, but I wasn’t a clever man.

My first part in a play was one of the witches in ‘Macbeth.’

I’ve never ever read a script. I really must read Macbeth, because I was in it once. I got a lot of laughs in that, I can tell you.

I always assumed I would leave drama school and do ‘Lady Macbeth’ and all sorts of serious things. It just didn’t happen.

I think there is this huge hole in Shakespeare that you do not know why Macbeth is who he is.

I think ‘Macbeth’ was a play that I’ve always gotten so much out of. My wife played Lady Macbeth in a play, and I designed it. There are things in there that are just kind of extraordinary.

I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of ‘Macbeth’ or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn’t get any of that.

If you’re a woman doing classic theater, the big roles are often destroyers. I’ve played Hedda Gabler, Lady Macbeth, some of the Chekhovian heroines, Electra, Phaedra – they’re all powerful women, but they’re forces of negativity.

At Rada, I was cast as Lady Macbeth and tried to do it as seriously as I could, but people still started laughing. I just think they find my face too funny.

I always want to abandon myself to my characters, and I never knew if I was actually abandoning myself to Lady Macbeth. I was scared to enter the darkness. Almost every day, I would go back home and be like, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?’ I had no idea.

I want to be evil! I did play Lady Macbeth on stage to Alec Baldwin’s Macbeth back in New York in 1998. But I’ve played a lot of characters who are so righteous and understanding. I don’t want to be a goody-goody two-shoes all the time.

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

I think it’s so interesting which ways your career can go. I would have been a completely different actor doing a completely different story, and I would have missed ‘Lady Macbeth.’

Richard III is not likeable. Macbeth is not likeable. Hamlet is not likeable. And yet you can’t take your eyes off them. I’m far more interested in that than I am in any sort of likeability.

‘Macbeth’ is an amazing story.

What does Macbeth want? What does Shakespeare want? What does Othello want? What does James want? What does Arthur Miller want when he wrote? Those things you incorporate and create in the character, and then you step back and you create it. It always must begin with the point of truth within yourself.

‘Lady Macbeth’ is a great opportunity for me to prove that maybe the outcome of ‘The Falling’ was not necessarily a fluke.

I can relate to anything. I once played Macbeth. I got a lot of laughs, so I quit.

I did ‘Macbeth’ in elementary school, but I was never in theater or anything like that.

‘Macbeth’ is a show I’m going to do again someday.

Macbeth is a very popular play with audiences. If you want to sell out a theater, just mount a production of Macbeth. It’s a short play, it’s an exciting play, it’s easy to understand, and it attracts great acting.

I can always do theater; I can do Ibsen, I can do Macbeth, I can do Chekhov, I can do Moliere, Othello, I can do Richard III.

I’d make a wonderful Lady Macbeth. I’ll wear a pair of platform shoes or something.

I was in a production of ‘Macbeth.’

I couldn’t be more proud to introduce Anne-Marie Duff, a phenomenal actress who is bursting on the world stage, to Broadway audiences as Lady Macbeth.

I want to do all kinds of things. I want to do some comedy. I’d love to do a romantic comedy, and I’d love to do some period pieces with classical text. I’d love somebody to cast me as Macbeth, but for a film. I just want to be all over the place.

I want to play Lady Macbeth. I have a big chip on my shoulder about Lady Macbeth. People usually play her as this cold, Greek witch, but there’s no evidence of that in the text! I think her intentions are pure.

Personally, I don’t want to live with limitations. If there comes a time where I am dying to play Juliet or Macbeth, I want to make those avenues for myself.

And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don’t always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I’m at a restaurant, I’ll think, ‘Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?’

I want to play Eva Peron. I’ve already done a lot of Shakespeare, but I’d like to do Lady Macbeth.

I don’t think of ‘Macbeth’ as the villain. I don’t think of ‘King Lear’ as the villain. I don’t think of ‘Hamlet’ as the villain. I don’t think of ‘Travis Bickle’ as the villain.

Every time ‘Lady Macbeth’ and everyone involved in the film gets nominated, it’s amazing.

In the theatre, if you say ‘Macbeth’, all the actors will start looking very anxious. I’m so well-trained not to say it in the theatre that I can hardly say it in normal life.

If you look at the play very closely, this is a thirdhand report of what a wonderful hero Macbeth is for saving Scotland. And in the next scene, he’s planning to murder Duncan, and you never really know why or what’s behind Macbeth.

With ‘Lady Macbeth,’ I had two other things offered to me, and they would have also been very fun, but you just have to figure that out. And then you do it.

I’ve always wanted to play ‘Lady Macbeth’ and Strindberg’s ‘Miss Julie’.

The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.

At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.

‘Macbeth’ sags in act four – the England scene with Malcolm and Macduff just doesn’t work theatrically. But with ‘Hamlet,’ although the play is so long, Shakespeare manages to sustain the arc.

‘Macbeth’ was a very lucky play for me.

The first time I saw ‘Macbeth’ was not the entire play. It was at acting school, and this student was working on Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy. I felt something very special, and I knew then that I would one day experience Lady Macbeth, but I always thought it would be on stage and in French.

My wide eyes make me look much younger without make-up, and although it’s fun to have a line in innocence corrupted, I doubt I’ll get to play the vampy vixen or a Hedda Gabler or Lady Macbeth.

I did a production of Macbeth in the 1960s in which I had a swordfight in the final scene. But the blade fell off my sword just as I was stabbing the guy. I ended up having to hammer him to death.

Sometimes I wake up and think, ‘I want to look like Sherlock Holmes today,’ and other times I want to look like a witch from ‘Macbeth.’

I first came across the script for ‘Macbeth’ between the ages of 11 and 12; it was the first book that shook my life. Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play.

‘Macbeth’ is one of those books that demand all of your attention.

I did theater at Spelman until I graduated from there, and I got to work with such luminous actresses as Diana Sands in ‘Macbeth.’

‘Macbeth,’ I am ambivalent about. I don’t like that play, in fact.

I’d really like to play Lady Macbeth.