Simon McBurney

“My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.”

“Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic.”

“When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.”

“My experience of my father's death was that it was still taboo; nobody would meet me after my father died because they didn't know what to say.”

“Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.”

“In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.”

“I don't tend to get cast in the theatre much. People assume I come with all this baggage. But they do cast me in films. In films, I'm a nobody.”

“Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?'”

“I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level.”

“The very beautiful and very touching thing about opera singers is they are very willing to do whatever you want. Unlike actors, who constantly want to know why they're doing something, opera singers will sort of follow you into the fires of hell.”

“The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.”

“As an actor, it's much easier for me to get work in the movies because nobody knows who I am except for the work that I've done in another movie. I really enjoy that.”

“Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.”

“Everyone sees something different in 'Endgame': a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth - not about the play, but about the person watching it.”

“My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.”

“I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong.”

“I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat?”

“In Japan, sometimes it's hard to know what you are looking at.”

“For me, acting is like a holiday. When you're directing, you have a strong sense of responsibility for others. It's exciting but exhausting, especially when you're like me: always wanting to break the rules.”

“'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.”