The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie & J. Berg Esenwein: “What do you read, my lord?" Hamlet replied, "Words. Words. Words." That is a world-old trouble.”
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: “There's the well-known case of Hamlet," Mr. Hilbery interposed, in his leisurely, half-humorous tones.”
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami: “Berlioz put it this way: A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.”
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: ““We have never finished Hamlet, Marianne; our dear Willoughby went away before we could get through it.”
Dracula by Bram Stoker: “I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say:-- "My tablets! quick, my tablets! 'Tis meet that I put it down," etc.”
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: “Give me—Fosco—chemistry; and when Shakespeare has conceived Hamlet, and sits down to execute”
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: “Mr. Wopsle said grace with theatrical declamation,—as it now appears to me, something like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third,”
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot: “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence.”
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens: “I can say to you of the healthful music of my pulse what Hamlet said of his.”
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens: “Little Paul might have asked with Hamlet 'into my grave?”
She by H. Rider Haggard: “…Another thing that makes me fix the date of this entry at the middle of the eighteenth century is that, curiously enough, I have an acting copy of "Hamlet," written about 1740, in which these two lines are misquoted almost exactly in the same way, and I have little doubt but that the Vincey who…”
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: “Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of "Hamlet."”
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope: “made such a comparison between Louis Scatcherd and Frank Gresham as Hamlet made between the dead and live king. It was Hyperion to a satyr.”
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope: “As he thought of this he quoted to himself against himself Hamlet's often-quoted appeal to the two portraits.”
The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells: “I used to be perfectly crazy about his plays. Don't you think 'Hamlet' is splendid?”
The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper: “O, a pit of clay for to be made For such a guest is meet. —Song in Hamlet.”
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters: “I have written the Iliad and Hamlet; And I have explored your mysteries, And searched for you without ceasing”
First Love by Ivan Turgenev: “All of us, like Polonius in “Hamlet,” decided that the clouds reminded us precisely of those sails”
The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy: “I remember seeing a performance of "Hamlet" by Rossi. Both the tragedy itself and the performer who took the chief part are considered by our critics”
The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green: ““Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.” Hamlet.”
Ulysses by James Joyce: “a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet”
Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf: “And Hamlet utters his soliloquy.”
The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings: “I tried Hamlet and Julius Caesar once or twice, and gave it up”
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster: “have you ever read Hamlet?”
Fraternity by John Galsworthy: ““Hamlet!” Hilary did not reply.”
The Secret City by Hugh Walpole: “This performance had been in preparation for at least ten years, and when such delights as Gordon Craig's setting of "Hamlet," or Benois' dresses for "La Locandiera" were discussed, the Wise Ones said:”
The Dark Flower by John Galsworthy: “these together with 'Hamlet' and 'King Lear' were all she had seen.”
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis: “That was how I set out for Hamlet's undiscovered country without the anxieties or doubts of the young prince.”
The Magus by John Fowles: “'Shall I get me to a nunnery?' 'I never felt less like Hamlet.'”
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern: “Celia quotes it directly and names it: "'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' Celia quotes at him... I am haunted by the ghost of my father, I think that should allow me to quote Hamlet”
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes: “Yes, he loved Shakespeare; before the war, he had written the music for a stage production of Hamlet... So Hamlet was banned for a long time; Stalin loathed the play almost as much as he loathed Macbeth.”
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: “I sometimes think of myself as Fortinbras—ha, ha—in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, who just keeps circling and circling around the action until everything else falls apart.”
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: “bought a copy of Hamlet signed by Shakespeare in ballpoint, imagine that”
Why Read the Classics by Italo Calvino: “Cardano essay opens on Hamlet's soliloquy / the book he reads”
2BR02B by Kurt Vonnegut: “"'To be or not to be' was the telephone number of the municipal gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination" — a deliberate pun explaining the story's title (2-B-R-0-2-B).”
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A. S. Byatt: “'Listen, Gillian,' he said: 'I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres...' 'I was good,' said Orhan, '...It was his part. Shakespeare himself played the Ghost.'”
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai: “Yale and Charlie had long held tickets to see Julian in Hamlet at Victory Gardens... "It's Hamlet," Yale said. "It's supposed to be unnerving." (also quoted on-page: "In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.")”
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin: “A few days earlier, anticipating Booth’s Hamlet, Lincoln had talked about the play with Francis Carpenter, the young artist who was at work on his picture depicting the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.”
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens: “"All right, Salman: Hamlet by Ludlum!" At once—and I mean with as much preparation as I have given you—"The Elsinore Vacillation." Fluke?”
Just Kids by Patti Smith: “There was the copy of Hamlet from Gerome Ragni, who imagined me playing the sad and arrogant Danish prince.”
My Life by Richard Wagner: “I had drawn largely upon Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth”
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville: “would that be the fair thing in Asmodeus? Or, as Hamlet says, were it 'to consider the thing too curiously?'”
Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon: “There was no 'Hamlet' with the celebrated water-scene, and the Danish prince taking a "header" to save poor weak-witted Ophelia.”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “from Shakespeare's Hamlet and Milton's Satan on through Romanticism, shapes both "Ulysses" and "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."”
Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope: “Bouncer did not condescend to do more than nod his head. "There is a murder described in _Hamlet_.”
Tai-Pan by James Clavell: “I also gave him a Bible and warned him against loose women and drunkenness and gambling and read out the piece of Will Shakespeare's Hamlet about 'neither a borrower nor a lender be' and made the lad write it down and put it in the cover of the Good Book.”
The Art of Fiction by Ayn Rand: “He presents his characters by means of their essence—the essence of a dominating father (King Lear), of a doubting intellectual (Hamlet), or of a jealous man (Othello).”
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari: “William Shakespeare wrote his version of The Lion King, better known as Hamlet.”
Cosmos by Alexander von Humboldt: “It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Coriolanus and A Winter's Tale, but we had heard that he had written... Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet.”
East, West by Salman Rushdie: “in the Hamlet of William Shakespeare, the morbid prince seems unaware of his own father's real name”
The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino: “recognizes the platform before Elsinore castle when the night's blackness falls; his mother has surprised him (The Lover!) raving for Ophelia.”
The Charioteer by Mary Renault: “"Hamlet had been the set play for School Certificate...Laurie had played Laertes"; later Laurie and Lanyon fence with the foil "used in Hamlet."”
Companion Piece by Ali Smith: “Gules... It's a word Shakespeare uses for blood... He uses it in Hamlet and that word sable with it too”
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea by Emily Wilson: “'springes' recalls Polonius warning Ophelia not to let Hamlet take her virginity”
How to be both by Ali Smith: “at her afternoon performance of the Hamlet someone had exploded a bottle of cherryade just as she started doing her rosemary for remembrance speech”
Partita by Barbara Kingsolver: “Why should anybody ask them to read Hamlet or play a sonata?”
The Disappearers by Marlon James: “Hamlet did fucking delay, too, you know.”
The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk: “'I read them Hamlet's soliloquies'; 'The children are playing Hamlet'”
There but for the by Ali Smith: “'Words words words, the child said... That's from Hamlet. A play by William Shakespeare'”
Winter by Ali Smith: “relief much thanks (Hamlet)”
Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray: “He used to quote passages of 'Hamlet' to his mother, which made her very angry.”
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler: “The result of his experience was that women had never done him any good and he was not accustomed to associate them with any pleasure; if there was a part of Hamlet in connection with them it had been so completely cut out in the edition of the play in which he was required to act that he had come to disbelieve in its existence. As for…”
Camilla by Frances Burney: “Camilla recollected her own'almost blunted purpose,' and fearfully asked if their Mother were yet at Belfont. [Footnote 6: Hamlet]”
The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy: “'This warm day has quite upset me!' There was a regular collapse of the tea-party, like that of the Hamlet play scene.”
I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki: “Even Shakespeare, forever and ever Shakespeare, would be dull. Unless someone now and then looks at Hamlet from between his legs and says, 'Look here, this won't do,' literature will never advance. [auto-translated]”
Kusamakura by Natsume Sōseki: “I do not mean to spread the realm of Wang Wei and Tao Yuanming in this age, but such feelings seem to me better medicine than a play or a ball. I value them above Faust, above Hamlet. [auto-translated]”
Sanshiro by Natsume Sōseki: “"Hamlet probably did not want to marry. There may be only one Hamlet, but there are many people like him." "What sort of people?" Hirota fell silent as smoke rose from his cigar. [auto-translated]”