Steven Berkoff

“A lot of praise is given to very mediocre work. Critics have lost their taste, hearing, and eyesight.”

“I like evil people.”

“Anti-Semitism has never gone away; it will always be there because it's a very convenient prejudice. The gene of it, the original DNA, is buried deep within our history. And even within some Jews as well.”

“My mother was almost entirely responsible for my cultural education. She took me to the library once a week, and by the age of seven, I was reading 100 books a year.”

“I hardly ever see new plays. They don't have the audacity and daring that they used to.”

“I have a daughter from a relationship I had in my late teens or early 20s. Because I felt it wasn't the kind of pukka behaviour my family or relatives would admit to, I denied it for many years.”

“That is the nature of the British psyche. It's very blunt, plain, very linear. It's pragmatic: it records life as it is.”

“There's a lot of talk about people being abused on Twitter, women being savagely insulted and degraded. I think, 'Why get into that in the first place?' If I jump into a garbage bin, I can't complain that I've got rubbish all over me.”

“Los Angeles is a weird mixture of every influence that Europe has dropped in its melting pot. It is hot, arid, picturesque, seething, banal, sometimes plain pleasant, and sometimes awesome.”

“I enjoy being in movies, but my heart will always lie with the theatre.”

“The most vital part of your humanity is the love you have for others. To deny it is to deny your life.”

“My earliest memory is of my first day at primary school and the distress of seeing my mother part from me.And being in a room full of strangers - of aliens. I felt that I would never see her again.”

“The great actors we had came from the actor-manager theaters. Not only did they create a team, they were the generals working with the soldiers.”

“It's impossible to have a favourite Shakespeare, since so many of the plays rouse and inspire completely different parts of your being.”

“We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.”

“Technology is the devil, and the more technology you have, the higher the price you pay.”

“After watching my poor mother being sometimes neglected by my father, it was almost tattooed on my brain that I would never cause hardship or despair to a partner.”

“Everyone remembers the bad guy long after they've seen the movie.”

“You are treated like a cog in a machine. The director might be obsessing so much with the stunts that he doesn't notice your performance, and the producer may just be an insane money man, but I have no snobbery about the movies.”

“A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator.”