If you can't fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe that whatever criticism, whatever comment is received, is meant.

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.

The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone.

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.