Art & Creativity Quote by Samuel West

The flattery here is so outsized it becomes a confession: West isn’t just praising Shakespeare, he’s staking a claim about what serious acting is supposed to be. Calling Shakespeare “the greatest writer there’s ever been” isn’t a hot take so much as a tribal signal inside British theatre culture, where reverence for the Bard doubles as a badge of craft, taste, and lineage. The “lucky enough to work with” phrasing matters, too. Actors don’t “work with” dead playwrights in any literal sense; they work with directors, casts, and audiences. West is pointing at a different kind of collaboration: the actor as co-author in performance, repeatedly discovering choices the text can sustain.

The pillow image is doing double duty. It’s intimate and devotional (Shakespeare as bedtime companion), but it’s also practical: a single “collected works” is cheating the one-book rule by sheer volume and variety. That sly loophole mirrors Shakespeare’s own abundance - comedies, tragedies, histories, dirty jokes, metaphysics - an entire cultural operating system in one spine.

“Who never bores me” is the key line because it rejects the polite lie that canonical art is always virtuous homework. West frames Shakespeare as inexhaustible entertainment, not museum duty. Subtext: if you’re bored, it’s not Shakespeare’s fault; you’re reading or staging him badly. In an era when the canon is constantly audited for relevance, West’s pitch is simple and strategic: Shakespeare endures because he’s playable, not because he’s sanctioned.