Peter Brook

“When I was 18 or 19, my one ambition was to make a film.”

“Being with the mainstream isn't very difficult - the tide is powerful, and it is easy to let it sweep us along with it. But going against the tide is very difficult. First of all, one must recognise very exactly what the tide is and where it is going.”

“The meaning of a theater event is that none of us could see something so clearly as with the new energy that is brought with the meeting of a theme, actors living it, and an audience gradually entering it to live it with them. At that moment, a certain light appears, revealing what we would never have thought of on our own.”

“Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.”

“Any scene in Shakespeare can be vulgarised almost out of recognition with the wish to have a modern concept.”

“I find, to my amazement, that I have reached the age of 90!”

“It's easy to give up, and that's the one thing we cannot do. That's what gives me a reason for working: to leave people with a little more courage, with a little hope that has been nourished. Even if, of course, it's going to disappear, whatever touches one isn't lost forever.”

“As a young man, I experimented with everything.”

“I've always wanted to try things for myself before passing a judgment on them.”

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

“No act of government can save the world.”

“That, for me, is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do.”

“Every form of theatre has something in common with a visit to the doctor. On the way out, one should always feel better than on the way in.”

“The thing that I have a horror of is ideological theatre - Shakespeare never told us how to think.”

“If, in English, we speak words, the French speak thoughts.”

“An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?”

“The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors, and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts.”

“I have great respect for Brecht, but his path is not mine.”

“A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, 'Take your time.'”

“Every choice I've ever made has been dictated by a formless hunch rather than by strict logic.”