Richard Eyre

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

“Balance is the enemy of art.”

“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.”

“Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.”

“The desire to share is not a vague, windy sentiment, not when you see the massive rise in live concerts in response to the phenomenon of downloading music... People want to get rid of the headphones and be part of a shared experience.”

“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.”

“I have a worm's eye view and a bird's eye view simultaneously and it's immensely helpful to understand what is happening on the shop floor when you are harnessing many talents and telling an intimate story on a large scale.”

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

“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.”

“'Mary Poppins,' the movie, was an object of mockery if you were a student in the '60s, something to be laughed at.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I envy the happiness of others... I envy the sense of belonging... I seem always to be remaking myself.”

“I'm inclined to think that, because it's such an awful life, that politicians do go into it for the best reasons. I mean, some may love the sound of their own voice. But it's such a wearying life, you've got to be impelled by some desire to leave the world a better place than when you came into it.”

“The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.”

“I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.”

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