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 Theater in Stratford.

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 artistic limits of the work.

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.

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

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 thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

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.

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 obviously needed.

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

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 huge enthusiasm.

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

A lonely soul is the best friend of itself

On Tuesday December seventh a lot of good things happened: they took the trach out, took the cast off my leg, and my PT, Maria, had me standing.

You see, my brethren, my heart is full; I could almost say it is too big to speak, and yet too big to be silent, without dropping a word to you.

A very talented player and all around excellent musician. I love hearing his records on radio!

Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians.

We black people, as a whole, are at war we'll say with the white power structure. Not physically, but we have definite protests to win the battle.

Do you realize, when Mandela was inaugurated president, he invited as his special guests the white jailers from his Robben Island prison? He literally did forgive everybody.

If you want an expert on war, you get a retired general. I'm not exactly a general, but I am retired.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.