Suppose Mozart had tried to be original? It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all of the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.

Every time you go the way the audience expects, they'll think you're original. People laugh with pleasure at the obvious.

I was crazy about silent comedy - in the old days, and crazy about Japanese movies.

Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong’, which is what our education encourages us to believe.

Every theatre worth anything has somebody in the middle of it who is driving it; like Joan Littlewood with her theatre.

I tell people not to do their best. I don't know when that started. Quite a while ago. Because I . . . when they're doing their best I don't get their best. So I try to persuade them to be average. Because if you're wonderful and you're average, you're still wonderful. If you're a bad improviser and you're average, you're what you are.

If you believe you're good already, you don't need to do extra stuff to impress us. Your best work comes when you're absorbed; because then your ego is away.