SIMON MCBURNEY

When I was doing 'A Disappearing Number' in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn't written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.

When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves.

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

Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.

I'm naturally attracted to something I don't understand because when you try to deal with something you don't understand, it opens a door into another world.

Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic.

Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.

We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.

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

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

If you're an actor, go out and act.

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.

Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.

As an actor, it's much easier for me to get work in the movies because nobody knows who I am except for the work that I've done in another movie. I really enjoy that.

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.

I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat?

My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.

I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience.

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.

I find all food irresistible. I have friends who live in the mountains in France. One of them sells vegetables, and to walk through her garden when everything is bursting out - it's impossible not to eat something.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

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.

The repeated action of working and playing acts like a trowel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops.

In the theatre, because you're all looking at the same thing in the same space, consciousness is no longer individual. There is a unified consciousness. Until you look and project what is happening, it doesn't exist; the audience are the ones making the theatre, not the players.