PETER BROOK

I've always worked a bit like a cook in a big restaurant, where you've got lots and lots of things laid out and you go and look into one cauldron and you look into the other and you see what's coming to the boil.

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

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.

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

To be violent is the ultimate laziness. War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol.

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.'

No act of government can save the world.

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

Theatre is, occasionally, capable of moments of truth.

As a young man, I experimented with everything.

I was raised in public schools, but from the word go, I never believed what the public schools were teaching me. Nor did I like the fact that they were fighting for the historical tradition of England.

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.

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

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

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

I never had a paying job that was not in theatre.

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.

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.

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

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.

Japanese children have infinitely more developed bodies than those in the West. From the age of two, a child learns to sit in a perfectly balanced manner; between two and three, the child begins to bow regularly, which is a wonderful exercise for the body.

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.

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

Never ask yourself what you have learned... only ask yourself what are the circumstances which are different from last year. In that way, you can apply last year's lessons.

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