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" If you're an actor, go out and act. "
Simon McBurney
You
Act
Actor
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" 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. "
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" I've had various people close to me die, and I don't necessarily find the idea of death purely depressing. "
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" Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?' "
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" Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone. "
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" In my opinion, there's nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else. "
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" '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. "
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" The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen. "
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" 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. "
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" In the theatre, because you're all looking at the same thing in the same space, consciousness is no longer individual. There is a unified consciousness. Until you look and project what is happening, it doesn't exist; the audience are the ones making the theatre, not the players. "
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Looking
Look
You
" I don't really think about a visual aspect to the work at all; I just think about making the piece. And everything that occurs visually comes out of the subject matter you are dealing with so that I find it difficult to treat the visual element as a separate entity. "
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Treat
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" 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. "
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School
Remember
" 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. "
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Love
Acting
Child
" 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. "
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" My work is not generally in the commercial sector. However, I'm not worried by the commercial sector. I refuse to work in any other way except the way that I work. "
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" For years, I wasn't in the least bit interested in opera. "
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Bit
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" I don't have what German directors call 'a concept' - a solid, fixed sense of the pattern that you should impose on the given work. I always get the feeling that I am raking up the earth rather than laying down the concrete. "
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" I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience. "
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" 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. "
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Walk
Food
Impossible
" Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling. "
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Say
Wonderful
Storytelling
" Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public. "
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" I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world. "
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" My experience of my father's death was that it was still taboo; nobody would meet me after my father died because they didn't know what to say. "
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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.' "
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Decision
" When I was doing 'A Disappearing Number' in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn't written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles. "
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" We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold. "
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" When I met Miller, for me it wasn't a question of wanting to meet him because it was Arthur Miller; it was a kind of astonishment that I could meet someone who was so deeply embedded in the psyche of my artistic development. "
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" My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it. "
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