Janet Suzman

“But I think the possibility of a black and white society feeding each other's expertises, living harmoniously, will probably go along in fits and starts now but at least it has a great constitution now to back it up.”

“Now that we have a democracy and you can go back and the airport air is not laden with evil any more, you can actually breathe oxygen when you land in Johannesburg.”

“I find its attention to living this life rather than the next one exhilarating because I think even independently of Judaism that that's the right way to go about life.”

“So we do have our exits and our entrances and we are perhaps mere, but I think if one keep a certain joyousness in life which should be in playing, then good for one, but it's slightly more serious than that.”

“I suppose meeting people whether it's in real life and actually shaking their flesh and blood hand or shaking the mystical hand of the character all rub off on you in some way.”

“OK, well maybe I have to get back to Judaism. In the sense that if I look at me and my forebears forever stretching back to I don't know, whenever there's no sense of place and therefore no sense of nationality.”

“You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really.”

“I still find that a kind of stricture of the heart happens when I see any form of bigoted or racist behaviour. I get an actual pain in my heart.”

“I mean one of the basic rules when you're acting is that you mustn't stand in judgement on a character, you mustn't say Hitler was a bad man because you can't act in that way.”

“I think it's a very central tenet to it yes, it is. I can't bear it, I can't bear inequality, I can't bear bad behaviour to other people. I cannot bear it that people are mean to people who can't help what they are.”

“My mother was very agnostic. She would never set foot in the synagogue, she couldn't be doing with it.”

“This is always a pain because it's injustice too and so my response to it, I tell you what I am more surprised or horrified at Jews who forget to be humanists than I am at anybody else.”

“But now I've got a young son and his interest is in science and now when I talk to him, I see that in the science sphere of our lives there is new, there is progress.”

“And I think that that emphasis on keeping a family together, alike, I think it's important.”

“But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.”

“Jews have had to carry around their own sense of self in a carpet bag and I think perhaps too much emphasis might be being put on nationality and on the other hand patriotism, that sort of thing.”

“Always you find that the more decisive event wins so my father's sort of annual decisiveness which came upon him on the Day of Atonement every year, he suddenly remembered that he was Jewish.”

“It was but then, when you're, one of the great poisonous events that have infected us all who were in South Africa is that the idea of difference is drip fed into your veins. It's that that you fight.”

“One tries to be an observer as an actor and indeed as a director because the small things, the give-away things are what are really interesting to a performer.”