Top 22 Richard Eyre Quotes

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.

The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.

Everything people say about grandparenthood is true – it is pleasure without responsibility. It is unquestioned love.

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.

I resent all organised religions.

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.

I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness… Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.

‘Mary Poppins,’ the movie, was an object of mockery if you were a student in the ’60s, something to be laughed at.

All good actors are very bright. You can’t be stupid and a good actor. You may be inarticulate, you may not be highly educated, but all good actors are quick-witted, some of them dazzlingly so. All you do is guide them.

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.

Every action has a consequence, so always try to be good.

Don’t ever be afraid to ask any question.

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.

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.

There are those who leave without our needing to detain them; we have said all there is to say.

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.

The principle of acting in good faith is at the heart of decent work.

What we hold in our heads – our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history – is the sum of our humanity.

You can’t be minimalist as a director until you have acquired the experience and confidence to say no.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

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.

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.