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 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.

I'm doing a little consulting. I'm somewhat retired, still a director of a company or two.

Take the tone of the company you are in.

So I decided to form a production company with my wife and our partner Diane.

Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.

This kid's excited because he's with Bad Company and I'm excited because I'm with Chuck Berrys' son.

It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.

Without In The Company of Men, I could still be teaching, so who knows if this would've existed.

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

That co-operation and peace rather than industrial strife and strikes will best promote the prosperity of the employees the company and all of the people and even strengthen the nation.

Our loss was very heavy, especially in the officers. Capt. Sale, of Co. E, Duke's regt, was among the killed, making the third Capt. that has been killed in that company.

It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.

I used to be pretty reckless. When I was a runner for a production company, I drove a massive 16 seater van. I was only 18. I mean I look young now, but then I looked about 12.

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet.

I didn't need to depend on the record company to publish my records.

So I've learned in the past, if a company approaches me and they want something like this, or something like that that I've done and I turn them down, they're going to do it anyhow.

No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn't.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

Hollywood is what you make it; you have to choose company with care because you become what they are.