Balance is the enemy of art.

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.

Balance is the enemy of art.

A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.

All good actors are very bright. You can't be stupid and a good actor. You may be inarticulate, you may not be highly educated, but all good actors are quick-witted, some of them dazzlingly so. All you do is guide them.

Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.

Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.

Don't ever be afraid to ask any question.

Every action has a consequence, so always try to be good.

Everything people say about grandparenthood is true - it is pleasure without responsibility. It is unquestioned love.

Governments have always been wary of the arts because they're wayward and ambiguous and because they deal with feelings rather than facts.

I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.

I can't think of anyone I admire who isn't fuelled by self-doubt. It's an essential ingredient. It's the grit in the oyster.

I resent all organised religions.

I sort of feel that climate change will be solved by science. I just feel instinctively that we will find a way of saving ourselves. But I am less confident that we won't destroy ourselves in other ways.

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

I was a chronically shy child. That kernel of my younger self is still there, but I've developed mechanisms to deal with it.

I'm never comfortable at theatre opening nights. If it's my own production I'm too wound up to be able to enjoy the performance and too wary to enjoy the event as a social occasion.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

The principle of acting in good faith is at the heart of decent work.

Theatre is castigated for wallowing in self-indulgence, but it's curiously unsentimental. You simply have to move on. Everything passes. Something in me likes that.

There are those who leave without our needing to detain them; we have said all there is to say.

There is in our society a gulf opening up, a kind of cultural apartheid, between those who are brought up to feel our national culture is theirs, to take ownership of it, and enjoy the privileges of that, and those who are completely disfranchised, those - for example - who will never be taken to the theatre to see Shakespeare.

Waiters are like actors waiting in the wings, bantering whenever we passed each other on the restaurant floor, shouting at each other backstage in the kitchen and winking and corpsing above the heads of our audience, the unsuspecting customers.

We can alleviate physical pain, but mental pain - grief, despair, depression, dementia - is less accessible to treatment. It's connected to who we are - our personality, our character, our soul, if you like.

What we hold in our heads - our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history - is the sum of our humanity.

You can't be minimalist as a director until you have acquired the experience and confidence to say no.

We can alleviate physical pain but mental pain grief despair depression dementia is less accessible to treatment. Its connected to who we are our personality our character our soul if you like.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

My art became very public.

Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

We have often been attracted to the story of the other, the outcast. And he and I just loved working together, so it just kept happening, and our relationship is completely bound up with our work. We enjoy each other's art.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

Art is an expression of who you are. Parts that I play are my sculptures.

There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.