Normally when people ask me what I do I say I'm an actor, and that's what I always wanted to be and that's the way I approach work even when I'm directing it.

One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.

I mean I'm talking about playing games, about imagining other people, and it's part of the way that it helps you actually see the world.

I think it was a desire to be able to find my own voice. I think that was the big urge within me.

Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.

I sometimes feel that I am trying to dig in the world around me. I'm involved in another kind of archaeology to look for another kind of truth, and the moment I find, the moment I am separated from that life, the moment I am sort of in a world, every time I have gone out and performed in the, in the cinema for example, if you do two or three films on the trot you suddenly have this impression that you're becoming separate or separated from the world around you.

The other, the other aspect when I say I'm an actor is that as an actor you make this imaginative leap into being somebody else, that's to say the muscle of the imagination is as important as any other of the muscles in your body, and so it is something about this instinct in space and time which for me I associate with being an actor rather than a director.