"A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator."
"I'm very resistant to most forms of theater."
"In London, nobody comments on what you wear - they think that's not important to you or your state of well-being."
"The great actors we had came from the actor-manager theaters. Not only did they create a team, they were the generals working with the soldiers."
"The mainstream is generally garbage. Look at the heavily subsidized theaters."
"Writing is an antidote for loneliness."
"Art is a way of penetrating and going deep into our unconscious and creating amazing worlds - as the Greeks did, if you like, as did Ovid with his stories and his fantasies."
"We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality."
"I like a lot of international people. Julie Taymore, the American director - she's one of the most exciting directors I've seen."
"That is the nature of the British psyche. It's very blunt, plain, very linear. It's pragmatic: it records life as it is."
"A lot of praise is given to very mediocre work. Critics have lost their taste, hearing, and eyesight."
"Transgender casting is a kind of literalism. It is the same with racial casting. This means that you can now only play Othello if you are black. There is something quite tainted about it. It is a form of racism in itself."
"When I started studying acting, I was enamoured of actors who used movement to enhance the language."
"I hardly ever see new plays. They don't have the audacity and daring that they used to."
"Facebook and Twitter are like a horrible digital plague."
"Anti-Semitism has never gone away; it will always be there because it's a very convenient prejudice. The gene of it, the original DNA, is buried deep within our history. And even within some Jews as well."
"When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found."
"British culture loves the image of itself in the mirror; it doesn't want to look deep inside, behind the eyes, inside the brain, inside where those shivers and nightmares lie."
"I've played a lot of bad guys in my time, especially in movies. It's delightful playing the villain. It's almost the most interesting and most complicated role in a film."
"Everyone remembers the bad guy long after they've seen the movie."
"I enjoy being in movies, but my heart will always lie with the theatre."
"I may be 80, but I intend to keep acting until the day I die. Instead of slowing down, I've discovered my second wind."
"You are treated like a cog in a machine. The director might be obsessing so much with the stunts that he doesn't notice your performance, and the producer may just be an insane money man, but I have no snobbery about the movies."
"I like watching films that have very impelling content, great persuasive language."
"Most American films have now become mindless. The human element has been removed, so you are just left with the surrogate human, which is the robot, so coincidentally or, rather, ironically, they are making films about robots, without realising they are talking about themselves."
