Vanessa Redgrave Quotations

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

Ask the right questions if you're to find the right answers.

Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.

Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived

Serbia has no right, under national or international law, to Kosovo.

I've opened my mouth on a lot of subjects. And I thought the more prestige you get, I'd have the power to do what I like. It's not true.

You can't be striving to please; you must be striving to get to the heart of the matter.

Upon accepting her Oscar for "Julia," 1978: "My dear colleagues, I thank you very very much for this tribute to my work. I think that Jane Fonda and I have done the best work of our lives, and I salute you and I pay tribute to you, and I think you should.

We will always want films ... that basically are centred on young people, because young people is the way we live on, we older people, insofar as we live on.

How can there be democracy if the leadership in the United States and Britain don't uphold the values which my father's generation fought the Nazis, millions of people gave their lives against the Soviet Union's regime, didn't they? Because of what? Democracy. And what democracy meant. No torture, no camps, no detention forever or without trial, without charges. In solitary confinement. Those techniques which are not just alleged, they have actually been written about by the FBI. I don't think it's being far left - I hope that I'm wrong to consider that it's far left to uphold the rule of law.

What I didn't understand was that the personal and the political go together. I felt at the time I had to sacrifice my children's present for their future. It seemed an either/or. I didn't realise that by being with one's own children I would have had a better understanding of the ones who are not my own. I was thinking of them but I didn't spend the time that they needed from me. It's a tribute to them that they came out so well.

I was surprised when I was asked to play Miss Daisy and wondered if I could – only in part because she was Jewish but, also because she was a Southern woman who has hardly opened her mouth before she declares she's not prejudiced, and yet everything she does shows how totally prejudiced she is.

As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future.

The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.

Theater helps people keep sane.

The stage is actor's country. You have to get your passport stamped every so often or they take away your citizenship.

The arts stop society going rotten and mad.

I think the theatre is as essential to civilization as safe, pure water.

On one occasion, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and myself were due to appear at the Sarajevo film festival and were turned off a UN plane on orders from Geneva. We had to get local journalists to transport the films in for us. I tell you this only to demonstrate that festivals can be a lifeline. But, after all the difficulties I'd had in getting there, in 1996 I found myself being flown in on a four-seater RAF plane as an official guest, endorsed by the British Embassy. Ironically, the film I was to present was Mission: Impossible.

I give myself to my parts as to a lover.

A conservative frame of mind is very limiting for an actor, and a human being, too.

The people I admire most are those who struggle for everyone.

Ask the right questions if you're going to find the right answers.

We all come to the theater with baggage; The baggage of our daily lives, the baggage of our problems, the baggage of our tragedies, the baggage of being tired. It doesn't matter what age you are. But if our hearts get opened and released - well, that's what theater can do, and does sometimes, and everyone is thankful when that happens.