Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.

There is something essentially sanguine about me, which I am inclined to attribute to the fact that I was born by caesarean section. It must affect you.

You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.

I'd like to direct more operas.

To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.

I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.