There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.

Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history.

Acting doesn't have to be threadbare misery all the time.

I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.

To be honest I live among the English and have always found them to be very honest in their business dealings. They are noble, hard-working and anxious to do the right thing. But joy eludes them, they lack the joy that the Irish have.

A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It's exciting when you hit on a new way.

My mother taught me to read.

The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.

People who are good at film have a relationship with the camera.

Theater dates very quickly.

I think America becomes more disgruntled by going to the movies and having an endlessly good time at them.

There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.

I certainly had no intention of playing a man.

I can hardly decide what plays I should be in.

Once you've done one style, you leave it for a while.

I would love to write the story of my upbringing in Ireland.

I just think that things should be allowed to run their course, and not turned into a Disney ride.

Every generation is obsessed with the decade before they were born.

So I just play the character, I play the lines.

I take the theater seriously in that I loathe it, I'm bored by it.

The energy released by it is enormous and it becomes quite addictive, the power between the audience and the actor.

I had a ball doing Harry Potter.

Also, an area that interests me - and it will probably take years to state what I mean - is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.

The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.

This whole tribal loyalty seems to have gone.

One moment cannot be the most important.

Even when they have nothing, the Irish emit a kind of happiness, a joy.

I find it incredibly tedious, hate that it murders itself with its own conservative pomposity.

There is a great relief in experiencing the worst vicariously.

There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.

There's something about the Irish that is remarkable.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

In a theater, the part is mine and I can control it as I want to. In the movies, I don't have direct contact, and I am fighting technical machinery.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

Sheer flattery got me into the theater. Flattery always works with me, particularly the flattery of women.

Actually, I didn't like Dartmouth very much, but the whole theater scene I really liked.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

It was very natural for me to want to disappear into dark theater, I am really very shy. That is something that people never seem to fully grasp because, when you are an actor, you are meant to be an exhibitionist.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.

I'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work.