Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in nee….

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature..

If you can't fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe tha….

I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with….

I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater..

One fine day I discovered that more complex plays really have to be directed..

The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare ….

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thou….

Mem'ry All alone in the moonlight I can smile at the old days Life was beautiful then..

I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do..

I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity..

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the arti….

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that..

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable..

Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a….

I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or if performances were canceled. It was a fix that ….

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that ….

What you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, t….

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespe….

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call….

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to d….