Quotes from Simon McBurney

I can't remember a single year of my life when I haven't made a piece of theatre.

'The Magic Flute,' I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people's consciousness.

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.

Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone.

With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time.

In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.

I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.

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

My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.

Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.

I spent the majority of time at school trying to break the rules. I would climb to the top of buildings; I even burned a building down once - not intentionally, just because I was interested in fire. I remember going through the rule book, ticking off the ones I had broken and looking for the ones I hadn't.

We try to place the human body in relation to the image all the time, so it's never a kind of a backdrop, but it's more of ...a much more integrative experience.

I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor. I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.'

I allow people to create, but I'm also marshalling everybody, which is difficult for my creativity, as I'm like a referee. Everybody else is kicking a ball. It is very messy. From the mess, though, you refine what is there.

Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.

My work is not generally in the commercial sector. However, I'm not worried by the commercial sector. I refuse to work in any other way except the way that I work.

Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?'

'The Master and Margarita' is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he's not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.

In my opinion, there's nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else.

Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.

In Japan, sometimes it's hard to know what you are looking at.

When my mother was dying, I cooked for her. One of the things I realised was that the smell and look of the food was key. I concentrated on how it looked on the plate. Even if the amount was small, it gave her a nourishment of a different kind.

I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible.