I have a worm's eye view and a bird's eye view simultaneously and it's immensely helpful to understand what is happening on the shop floor when you are harnessing many talents and telling an intimate story on a large scale.
— Richard Eyre
I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.
I'm inclined to think that, because it's such an awful life, that politicians do go into it for the best reasons. I mean, some may love the sound of their own voice. But it's such a wearying life, you've got to be impelled by some desire to leave the world a better place than when you came into it.
I envy the happiness of others... I envy the sense of belonging... I seem always to be remaking myself.
I sort of feel that climate change will be solved by science. I just feel instinctively that we will find a way of saving ourselves. But I am less confident that we won't destroy ourselves in other ways.
Waiters are like actors waiting in the wings, bantering whenever we passed each other on the restaurant floor, shouting at each other backstage in the kitchen and winking and corpsing above the heads of our audience, the unsuspecting customers.
Every action has a consequence, so always try to be good.
I resent all organised religions.
I'm never comfortable at theatre opening nights. If it's my own production I'm too wound up to be able to enjoy the performance and too wary to enjoy the event as a social occasion.
All good actors are very bright. You can't be stupid and a good actor. You may be inarticulate, you may not be highly educated, but all good actors are quick-witted, some of them dazzlingly so. All you do is guide them.
Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.
The principle of acting in good faith is at the heart of decent work.
Balance is the enemy of art.
The desire to share is not a vague, windy sentiment, not when you see the massive rise in live concerts in response to the phenomenon of downloading music... People want to get rid of the headphones and be part of a shared experience.
The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.
Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.
I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it.
There are those who leave without our needing to detain them; we have said all there is to say.
Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.
I was a chronically shy child. That kernel of my younger self is still there, but I've developed mechanisms to deal with it.
A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.
I can't think of anyone I admire who isn't fuelled by self-doubt. It's an essential ingredient. It's the grit in the oyster.
What we hold in our heads - our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history - is the sum of our humanity.
Governments have always been wary of the arts because they're wayward and ambiguous and because they deal with feelings rather than facts.
You can't be minimalist as a director until you have acquired the experience and confidence to say no.
If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.
I'm wary of artistic directors who say, 'Here is my vision', because it's empirical. Basically it's about who you work with and what plays you put on; the vision comes out of that.
'Mary Poppins,' the movie, was an object of mockery if you were a student in the '60s, something to be laughed at.
I've always believed that you write to discover what you think. On most subjects, if I'm asked what do I think about them, I'd say I don't know, I'll have to write them down.
I've always argued, unsuccessfully, that there's no point in giving money to the arts unless you educate people in them.
We can alleviate physical pain, but mental pain - grief, despair, depression, dementia - is less accessible to treatment. It's connected to who we are - our personality, our character, our soul, if you like.
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.
Don't ever be afraid to ask any question.
I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.
Theatre is castigated for wallowing in self-indulgence, but it's curiously unsentimental. You simply have to move on. Everything passes. Something in me likes that.
Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.
Everything people say about grandparenthood is true - it is pleasure without responsibility. It is unquestioned love.
I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.
