About Richard Eyre: Sir Richard Charles Hastings Eyre is an English film, theatre, television and opera director.
Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can't resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.
Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.
I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it.
Balance is the enemy of art.
I'm inclined to think that, because it's such an awful life, that politicians do go into it for the best reasons. I mean, some may love the sound of their own voice. But it's such a wearying life, you've got to be impelled by some desire to leave the...
I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.
I can't think of anyone I admire who isn't fuelled by self-doubt. It's an essential ingredient. It's the grit in the oyster.
I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.
Waiters are like actors waiting in the wings, bantering whenever we passed each other on the restaurant floor, shouting at each other backstage in the kitchen and winking and corpsing above the heads of our audience, the unsuspecting customers.
We can alleviate physical pain, but mental pain - grief, despair, depression, dementia - is less accessible to treatment. It's connected to who we are - our personality, our character, our soul, if you like.
There are those who leave without our needing to detain them; we have said all there is to say.
Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.
'Mary Poppins,' the movie, was an object of mockery if you were a student in the '60s, something to be laughed at.
Governments have always been wary of the arts because they're wayward and ambiguous and because they deal with feelings rather than facts.
I resent all organised religions.
Don't ever be afraid to ask any question.
I was a chronically shy child. That kernel of my younger self is still there, but I've developed mechanisms to deal with it.
I have a worm's eye view and a bird's eye view simultaneously and it's immensely helpful to understand what is happening on the shop floor when you are harnessing many talents and telling an intimate story on a large scale.
Theatre is castigated for wallowing in self-indulgence, but it's curiously unsentimental. You simply have to move on. Everything passes. Something in me likes that.
I'm never comfortable at theatre opening nights. If it's my own production I'm too wound up to be able to enjoy the performance and too wary to enjoy the event as a social occasion.
