The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.

Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.

It takes a long while for a director to cease thinking in terms of the result he desires and instead concentrate on discovering the source of energy in the actor from which true impulses arise.

The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful.

Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now.

A word does not start as a word – it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictates the need for expression.

The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved.

In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.

People are seen through the stained glass window of our imagination. ( "The hidden sides of his character" )

There are ultimately two choices in life: to fight it or to embrace it. If you fight it you will lose - if you embrace it you become one with it and you'll be lived.

They say that to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is fully calculable

You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.

How you feel right now is about equally genetic and circumstantial, but how you will feel on average over the next ten years is fully 80 percent because of your genes.

Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

I would go to war with words, not weapons. I would die talking before I lifted a weapon.

One little lie or dishonest act leads to another until the perpetrator is caught in the web of deceit.

I enjoy writing in a lot of different styles, so I pushed to find that vicious place, or that vulnerable place, and let it exist as intensely as I could.