Quotes from Steven Berkoff

The most vital part of your humanity is the love you have for others. To deny it is to deny your life.

I do a devilish borscht, and I'm very good at pickles. I used to make jars and jars of sweet-and-sour pickled cucumbers.

I liked Stanley Kubrick from the start. He had a warm, benign nature and offered himself to you as a friend and ally. He seemed to possess no airs or attitudes, neuroses, or predilection towards tantrums.

The great actors we had came from the actor-manager theaters. Not only did they create a team, they were the generals working with the soldiers.

I like watching films that have very impelling content, great persuasive language.

Facebook and Twitter are like a horrible digital plague.

It's impossible to have a favourite Shakespeare, since so many of the plays rouse and inspire completely different parts of your being.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

Los Angeles is a weird mixture of every influence that Europe has dropped in its melting pot. It is hot, arid, picturesque, seething, banal, sometimes plain pleasant, and sometimes awesome.

In London, nobody comments on what you wear - they think that's not important to you or your state of well-being.

Anti-Semitism has never gone away; it will always be there because it's a very convenient prejudice. The gene of it, the original DNA, is buried deep within our history. And even within some Jews as well.

I hardly ever see new plays. They don't have the audacity and daring that they used to.

A lot of praise is given to very mediocre work. Critics have lost their taste, hearing, and eyesight.

After watching my poor mother being sometimes neglected by my father, it was almost tattooed on my brain that I would never cause hardship or despair to a partner.

Technology is the devil, and the more technology you have, the higher the price you pay.

I have a daughter from a relationship I had in my late teens or early 20s. Because I felt it wasn't the kind of pukka behaviour my family or relatives would admit to, I denied it for many years.

That is the nature of the British psyche. It's very blunt, plain, very linear. It's pragmatic: it records life as it is.

The theatre is your pulpit - it is your church - and you want to be a priest in your church, and that's what I believe in.

I may be 80, but I intend to keep acting until the day I die. Instead of slowing down, I've discovered my second wind.

I'm very resistant to most forms of theater.

The mainstream is generally garbage. Look at the heavily subsidized theaters.

If you put out garbage, you turn people into garbage.

Most American films have now become mindless. The human element has been removed, so you are just left with the surrogate human, which is the robot, so coincidentally or, rather, ironically, they are making films about robots, without realising they are talking about themselves.

During the Second World War, we lived in a flat on Whitechapel Road in the East End of London. At one point during the blitz, the air-raid sirens went off every night for 30 nights, and each time, my parents would grab my sister and me and take us to the shelter beneath Whitechapel underground station.