Ian Mckellen Quotes

[Vincent Price] did Oscar Wilde on Broadway, and I think he probably did it because he was almost like an Oscar Wilde. He had that brilliant humor.

Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?

I come alive when I have assisted in bringing out the printed word on the stage, you know, and I enjoy directing plays. It's a tactile process, theatre, unlike a number of other forms of the creative work.

I started as a director, but I was too bored with actors. I preferred to act.

I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?

Some directors are very free and some directors are very specific. It seemed like doing a play.

At the moment, my trajectory isn't to think about acting. I'm absolutely devoted to The Imaginarium, our projects and directing. And watching and enabling other actors do their thing in our studio is hugely rewarding. I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.

I think acting is an important profession, because acting can give you pleasure and can teach you at the same time, and that is a good thing.

I think a good director casts a film so that the actors bring a lot to the table.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

Therefore, when you see the end result, it's difficult to see who's the director, me or them. Ultimately, everything belongs to the actors - we just manage the situation.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

When you come to actually act, it's a game. It may be a very serious game, but it's still a game. If you lose that sense of play, the work suffers.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mearly players.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

The great, rewarding thing about directing is that you're overseeing the whole thing. When you're an actor, you're just one department.

All the world's a stage.

I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development.

One of the greatest things I've learned, as an actor, was how to talk to actors.

As an actor, you're a color of paint on someone else's palette. But as a director, it's your canvas and you make the painting you want to make.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Actors want to do Shakespeare again and again, or want to do Hamlet. When you hear one guy do Hamlet and another guy do it, it's going to be a whole different experience.