Richard Eyre Quotes

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Richard Eyre

Profession : Director

Birth : March 28, 1943

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

Richard Eyre

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

Richard Eyre

A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.

Richard Eyre

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.

Richard Eyre

Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.

Richard Eyre

I envy the happiness of others... I envy the sense of belonging... I seem always to be remaking myself.

Richard Eyre

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.

Richard Eyre

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.

Richard Eyre

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

Richard Eyre

I'm wary of artistic directors who say, 'Here is my vision', because it's empirical. Basically it's about who you work with and what plays you put on; the vision comes out of that.

Richard Eyre

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.

Richard Eyre

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.

Richard Eyre

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.

Richard Eyre

I've always believed that you write to discover what you think. On most subjects, if I'm asked what do I think about them, I'd say I don't know, I'll have to write them down.

Richard Eyre

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.

Richard Eyre

Balance is the enemy of art.

Richard Eyre

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.

Richard Eyre

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

Richard Eyre

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

Richard Eyre

Governments have always been wary of the arts because they're wayward and ambiguous and because they deal with feelings rather than facts.

Richard Eyre