HARIS PASOVIC

I grew up in adoration of writers like Hemingway, George Orwell, Anna Akhmatova, and that has always been my idea about the artist - that you have to be a brave and freedom-loving person.

We need the daring visions. To go to theatre must be different than to go to shopping. We adventure together, we journey through the mindful and emotional landscapes, we create together an event, unique and unrepeatable.

Theatre, for me, is about providing to the audience a new and exciting experience.

Europe is a much more complex historical, cultural, and geographical concept than is envisaged in the reduced approach by the European Union.

Many have asked me, 'Why have a film festival in the middle of a war?' But they have it backwards. The question is, 'Why have a war in the middle of a film festival?'

We realised that art, theatre, and music in Sarajevo were resistance at the deepest level.

Art is freedom. If we don't have that element, we don't feel human anymore. Art is not decoration or a function. Before all that, art is art. This connection to meaning - our inner, intuitive knowledge - is something.

My company, East West, was founded on the premise that people need to group together and not be xenophobic, parochial, or provincial.

The meaning of art in a time of suffering, a time of war, is much more intense. People are more focused.

People have to have food for their souls.

Art has to be able to match life, to respond to the ever-changing forms of the world, to electrify the audience.

The 21st century is significantly different from the 20th century. The old models will not hold anymore. More and more, we are one people on Earth. We need to share our problems.

Football is probably the most democratic human activity. It belongs to everyone... to poor and rich, illiterate and educated, to all races, cultures, and nations.

To come to the theatre, people have to make arrangements, change their clothes, find a babysitter, find a parking space - and they don't come after hard work to hear a lecture.

Life is not just food, it's something spiritual.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

I think we are slowly killing liberty, creativity, intelligent thinking; it's as if we are being led into a world that is like a huge shopping centre, with a sort of anaesthesia about everything except the choice of goods in front of us.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence enshrines the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Alas, that is not the case everywhere in the world.

Individual acts have made Europe a civilized place and are key to its development. We must not forget it.

War and peace-making, human rights, humanitarian issues have become industries, but nobody looks closely at human greed, at the arms industry and the manufacture of landmines. Art has to take a wider view. The problems of Ireland are my problems, too.

I work in theater, so I am always working in front of empty chairs. They represent a future presence. They are never just chairs.

I learned a lot about Ottoman court, and it was very Shakespearian in essence. Stories like the one in 'Hamlet' did happen several times in the 500 years of Ottoman history.

People come to the theatre in search of a real encounter with other human beings, and we must give them what they come for. Our capacity to do that is the measure of being human. And if the price is that we sometimes say something not very pleasant - well, that's precisely why people want us, in the end: because we speak the truth.

Art can articulate new ideas.

Yes, I am mad - like the Marquis de Sade was mad, like Giordano Bruno was mad, like Antonin Artaud was mad.