Peter Brook Quotes

Peter Brook gives plain-spoken thoughts on why and how, great for anyone curious about creative process.

16 quotes

1. The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

2. Everything is impossible so just quit.

3. An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?

4. I've always worked a bit like a cook in a big restaurant, where you've got lots and lots of things laid out and you go and look into one cauldron and you look into the other and you see what's coming to the boil.

5. Shakespeare doesn't belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now. It's like coal. The only meaningfulness of a piece of coal starts and finishes with its combustion, giving us light and heat. And that to me is Shakespeare.

6. Never ask yourself what you have learned... only ask yourself what are the circumstances which are different from last year. In that way, you can apply last year's lessons.

7. Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.

8. No act of government can save the world.

9. I have great respect for Brecht, but his path is not mine.

10. We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

11. The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful.

12. Every choice I've ever made has been dictated by a formless hunch rather than by strict logic.

13. In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.

14. One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance.

15. Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now.

16. Theatres, actors, critics and public are interlocked in a machine that creaks but never stops. There is always a new season in hand and we are to busy to ask the only vital question which measures the whole structure. Why theatre at all? What for? Is it an anachronism, a superannuated oddity? Surviving like an old monument or a quaint custom? Why do we applaud and what? Has the stage a real place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it serve? What could it explore? What are its special properties?