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

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" I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something. "

" My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with 'Endgame,' where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth. "

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

" 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. "

" Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world. "

" 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. "

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

" I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level. "

" My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everyone sees something different in 'Endgame': a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth - not about the play, but about the person watching it. "

" 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. "

" I've had various people close to me die, and I don't necessarily find the idea of death purely depressing. "

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

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "