Simon McBurney

“Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.”

“When I was doing 'A Disappearing Number' in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn't written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.”

“We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.”

“I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.”

“My work is not generally in the commercial sector. However, I'm not worried by the commercial sector. I refuse to work in any other way except the way that I work.”

“I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space.”

“Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.”

“I've had various people close to me die, and I don't necessarily find the idea of death purely depressing.”

“With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time.”

“I don't have what German directors call 'a concept' - a solid, fixed sense of the pattern that you should impose on the given work. I always get the feeling that I am raking up the earth rather than laying down the concrete.”

“I'm naturally attracted to something I don't understand because when you try to deal with something you don't understand, it opens a door into another world.”

“Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don't talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways.”

“Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.”

“There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light.”

“The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.”

“In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here.”

“'The Master and Margarita' is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he's not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.”

“I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible.”

“When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves.”

“I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with 'Endgame,' where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth.”