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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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" 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. "

Simon McBurney

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Deal

You

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Simon McBurney

Father

Say

" 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. "

" I allow people to create, but I'm also marshalling everybody, which is difficult for my creativity, as I'm like a referee. Everybody else is kicking a ball. It is very messy. From the mess, though, you refine what is there. "

" 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. "

Simon McBurney

Responsibility

You

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light. "

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

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

" The very beautiful and very touching thing about opera singers is they are very willing to do whatever you want. Unlike actors, who constantly want to know why they're doing something, opera singers will sort of follow you into the fires of hell. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For some years, I've been very interested in the relationship between science and art. "

" 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. "

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

" I don't tend to get cast in the theatre much. People assume I come with all this baggage. But they do cast me in films. In films, I'm a nobody. "

Simon McBurney

Nobody

Theatre

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I remember the fact that milk was delivered every day by a milkman. In summer, my mother would make what now seem in my middle-aged imagination the most delicious iced milkshakes. "

" 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. "

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