Sam Wanamaker Quotes

I love antique architecture, so if I have any indulgences, I have owned and renovated and reconstructed a lot of old houses.

I almost rented a house by an architect named Schindler, but I couldn't afford it. It was a jewel.

After the near-total destruction of Dresden in the Allied fire-bombing of February 1945, few people believed that its beauty would ever return. Dresden's slow but steady comeback was thus met with great relief.

The ancient city Aqpu, where kings who had preceded me had built, had deteriorated and turned into ruined hills. I rebuilt the city completely, decorated it and made it bigger than it was before. I then built my palace.

Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of the old. Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? Here the wisdom of whole generations is stored. What feelings for material and what power of expression there is in these buildings! What warmth and beauty they have! They seem to be echoes of old songs.

The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare.

When you look at classical structures, they're often linked to literature, music, or a poem. They were constructed by master builders, which means it's not something standard that you can copy.

I mean, the Globe is the most famous theater in the western world. The British have absolutely neglected it. It's an embarrassment to them that they haven't done anything about it.

To make a successful film from a successful play is probably much more difficult than making one from scratch, just as any carpenter will tell you that it is more difficult to restore an old house than to build a comparable new one.

I've become obsessed with preserving Shaker furniture. I feel as though every influence in my life, everything I've learned and know, all the money I've made, has come together to take care of it.

You could say that I had become possessed, in the classical sense, by the art of the great architects of the past. And that led me to engineering.

I love going into junk shops, picking up something that looks like it's got a bit of history to it, then sanding it down and reviving it.

I actually built my own dining table back home in Australia. It's a secret hobby of mine that I weirdly find transfixing.

The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is an astonishing building, designed by Christopher Wren. Its painted ceiling has just been restored so that the darkish miasma that was Robert Streeter's original allegory of truth and light striking the university is now bright with playful cherubs and lustrous clouds.

I really wanted to give people that tool, that thing, that answer, 'Well, what are you going to do after Katrina? How does New Orleans come back?' And I'm thinking to myself, New Orleans is back. We're the definition of 'back.' We're the definition of 'rebirth,' of 'renaissance.'

I actually feel like a very traditional architect.

This is more than just the rebuilding of the Globe, creating some kind of monument to Shakespeare which he doesn't need. His books are his monuments. But this will be a major center for the study of Shakespeare in performance. We are making the only faithful effort to restore the theater in every respect as close to the original as possible.

My father is a very skilled carpenter. He can do just about anything with his hands. He is very artistic with his carpentry.

To be able to make furniture has always been a fantasy of mine.

My father, Beric, ran a joinery business and owned two factories.

Maybe there is hope in the fragments, that what is lost can always be filled in by someone who knows.

New things had to be made out of fragments.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

...the poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.

At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light....still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.