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 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.

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

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.

You are faced with the choice: either my integrity remains intact and this is the work that ends up on the screen, or I have to leave, and I have to be known to have left.

When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

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.

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.

I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

When I was 13 years old, a professional theater company in my town needed a kid actor. I auditioned, and I got the part, so for just a few weeks I became a member of the company and I met some professional actors.

If you can't fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe that whatever criticism, whatever comment is received, is meant.

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.

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

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.

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.

Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.

I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater.

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.

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.

What you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to do anything. It has to do with listening, with humility and a sense of yourself.

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.

I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity.

This administration in Washington... clearly believes that government is not only the answer to every need but it's the most qualified to make essential decisions for every American in every area. That mix of arrogance and audacity that guides the Obama administration is an affront to every freedom-loving American.

Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel.

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.

What annoys the hell out of me is the arrogance of some people. They don't even listen to our music, they decided in advance that they don't like it.

I'm Billy the Kid, the fastest draw. It's not arrogance. It's the truth.

It is not a sign of arrogance for the king to rule. That is what he is there for.

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

Timing and arrogance are decisive factors in the successful use of talent.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

We have a president who stole the presidency through family ties, arrogance and intimidation, employing Republican operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands of blacks, elderly Jews and other minorities.

We had every problems starting a big top could have. The tent fell down on the first day. We had problems getting people into the shows. It was only with the courage and arrogance of youth that we survived.

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

What moves me is neither ethnocentric pride nor sectarian arrogance. I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures. But it is mine.

The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.

This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.

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.

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

Honest discussions - even and perhaps especially on topics about which we disagree - can help us resist hypocrisy and arrogance. They can also help us live up to the basic ideals, such as liberty and justice for all, on which our country was founded.

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.

This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy.