I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity.

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.

The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.

I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.

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