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" For me, acting is like a holiday. When you're directing, you have a strong sense of responsibility for others. It's exciting but exhausting, especially when you're like me: always wanting to break the rules. "

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" I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor. I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.' "

Simon McBurney

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Decision

" I find all food irresistible. I have friends who live in the mountains in France. One of them sells vegetables, and to walk through her garden when everything is bursting out - it's impossible not to eat something. "

" Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling. "

" For years, I wasn't in the least bit interested in opera. "

" I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong. "

" 'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience. "

" I'm naturally attracted to something I don't understand because when you try to deal with something you don't understand, it opens a door into another world. "

" When my mother was dying, I cooked for her. One of the things I realised was that the smell and look of the food was key. I concentrated on how it looked on the plate. Even if the amount was small, it gave her a nourishment of a different kind. "

" When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves. "

" As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play - and if you've forgotten how to play, you shouldn't be an actor. "

" In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo. "

" Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV. "

" With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time. "

" If you're an actor, go out and act. "

" When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting. "

" I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat? "

" In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights. "

" I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space. "

" In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here. "

" Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse. "

" As an actor, it's much easier for me to get work in the movies because nobody knows who I am except for the work that I've done in another movie. I really enjoy that. "

" The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. "

" Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.' "

" The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen. "

" I spent the majority of time at school trying to break the rules. I would climb to the top of buildings; I even burned a building down once - not intentionally, just because I was interested in fire. I remember going through the rule book, ticking off the ones I had broken and looking for the ones I hadn't. "

" So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.' "

" I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience. "

" Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don't talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways. "

" Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time. "

" In Japan, sometimes it's hard to know what you are looking at. "