I like to do really good things. But 'good' - witness Charles Dickens - doesn't mean 'not popular.'

I like working with authors who are a bit pesky.

There's something very fine and lucid and rich in this tradition of the English actor.

I wish I'd played Coriolanus.

Anything I do is as theatrical as I can get it.

Nothing in the world in perfect. Even a still photograph.

No lens is quick enough to track the movement of the human body. The molecules are always moving.

I don't think perfection is possible. I think you can attempt to reach perfection, but I don't think it's a possible thing. I think perfection is a moving point, and we spend our artistic lives chasing it.

Rattigan wrote some very good plays.

Well-written plays deserve to be learned from and understood properly, both by actors and audiences alike, and Rattigan's very human characters help us do that.

I was 36 when I played Nicholas Nickleby.

I am an anthologist, you see. I sort of make anthologies for people.

I was an art student when I was a boy, and as an art student you don't have to talk to anyone - you just have to paint really wonderful paintings. It's very unlike being an actor, where you have to talk all the time.

I joined the Royal Shakespeare Co. with no experience whatsoever - I'd never been to a drama school or anything. But I was strong and could lift things, I could move scenery about.

Sometimes I think I'll go off and be a milkman or a greengrocer, some easy job.

Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.

I just do what I'm asked, really.

I think like an actor when I'm acting, and I think like a director when I'm directing.

All this thing that L.A. doesn't have any love for the theater isn't true.

Exercising choice is a good thing.

Now, when I talk about Shakespeare, I can't talk too much about Gielgud or Olivier. Because nobody knows who I'm talking about.

I've been with Shakespeare all my life.

I'm astonished to say, but people are really pleased to hear what happened to me, the way I got a little bit more confident, the people I've met, and the things I didn't know.

History is with us until we learn from the suffering of the past.

Daring to love someone is something we all do.

Gerry Schoenfeld told me 'Les Parents Terribles' was not going to sell, even though we had Kathleen Turner and Jude Law in the cast. So we called it 'Indiscretions.'

I've learned from the greatest people, and I've got wonderful things to pass on.

I don't know why, but I was really good in that first play.

'Waiting for Godot,' when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.

If you live in the States, you have to join a gym.

I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can't just switch it on and off.

'Nicholas Nickleby' was the best example, where 43 people could make an audience of 1,500 look at a fingernail at any given moment. It was so controlled, and yet it was a group of disparate individuals. It was a happy, constructive time, and it seemed to be an active discussion of what makes the theater work.

What I strive to do is to make the theater experience something that people remember and recall rather than dismiss because it was less like their everyday experiences. So, I'm less interested in internal emotionalism and much more in making the audience laugh and cry by the devices that we use as theater actors.

'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.

It's a vain craft, acting.