Kenneth Branagh quotes:

I suppose, at 50, you value things in a different way. So you value connections, you value your friendships, you value your health, and you are much more aware of time passing.

For what it's worth, I enjoy 'Dexter,' 'Modern Family,' 'True Blood' and 'Breaking Bad.' I've enjoyed the wonderful 'The Pacific.'

I did 'Celebrity' by Woody Allen. I did 'The Gingerbread Man' with Robert Altman. These were big talents.

Lighten up, just enjoy life, smile more, laugh more, and don't get so worked up about things.

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

I think A Midsummer Night's Dream would be terrific because of the transformations that occur. Or The Tempest, things like that. Extraordinary larger than life or supernatural element.

I'll tell you what I'm grateful for, and that's the clarity of understanding that the most important things in life are health, family and friends, and the time to spend on them.

Jack Ryan' is a very fast-paced, very contemporary, very action-driven thriller.

I am a long-time hide-behind-the-sofa-in-the-early-Doctor Who-in-the-1960s fan.

I think that short films often contain an originality, a creative freedom, an energy and an invention that is inspiring and entertaining. I think they are, as Shakespeare put it, a good deed in a naughty world.

I live in the English countryside, so I'm surrounded by magpies.

Thor' has got several big battles in it, a reckless, headstrong young hero who has to confront his past and deal with a complicated relationship with his father, it has lots of savage Europeans hacking each other to death at various points, and all of this sounded very much like 'Henry V.'

At the end of every stage performance, the audience all applaud me for doing my job, but I have friends who work in offices who don't get that.

How many times do you read about 'the Cinderella story,' the story of the underdog, the story of the ordinary human being, often subjected to cruelty and ignorance and neglect, who somehow triumphs?

I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.

Sir Derek Jacobi has been an inspiration to so many actors and audiences throughout his brilliant career. To see him in Shakespeare is an event in itself.

I think that music is crucially important in Shakespeare - and, clearly, was an important part of the Elizabethan theatre. And, it's always been something that was a profound element of the experience of Shakespeare that I have been drawn to - and interpreters have, as well.

Sometimes I used to think to myself, 'Have I lost a sense of humor?' but I don't think that I have. I think one can be as snarky and sarcastic as lots of people, but I have never found that it makes me particularly happy.

My definition of success is control.

I only got 'War and Peace' on the third attempt.

Carrying a movie is both a great privilege, it's a great opportunity, but it can be a great pressure, and sometimes that can make people behave very oddly.

I certainly have been guilty of trying to sweep things under the carpet.

In the course of my lifetime, that world went from violence to a kind of peace.

There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them.

I don't know that the Brits have the monopoly on being organized, but they do have a way of working with which I'm familiar. It's not necessarily the best way, but it's a way.

My dad, for the first 15 years of my career, on every visit he made to a play or a film set, would find the oldest person on set and say, 'Do you think my son has a future?'

There are some amazing stories from all over this country, where people's work and contribution has been acknowledged. To be part of that is an absolutely fantastic feeling.

A lot of the films I've done have links to other movies that I've directed in the past.

Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.

The long version of the play is actually an easier version to follow. In all of the cut versions the intense speeches are cut too close together for the audience and the actors.

What you want is the opportunity to work and an audience. Prizes after that are just a great big bonus.

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.

You go to the airport and look at the bookstand, and you feel the titles are similar, the covers are similar, and you wonder how they can be different.

I went to a comprehensive school and didn't go to university.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

A brother who is unhappy is a dangerous relative to have.

Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

Life is about making plans from which you deviate, almost always. If you are lucky, you do come up with a plan.

I had a friend who introduced me to a meditation practice which involves a couple of half-hours a day of meditation, where essentially you try to achieve a stillness that allows you to just be there in the moment.

I am very much looking forward to new adventures - including, I hope, Broadway - sooner rather than later.

Friendship is one of the most tangible things in a world which offers fewer and fewer supports.

I'm always interested in contemporary fiction.

It's very strange that the people you love are often the people you're most cruel to.

For a nanosecond in the pre-Internet pre-digital age, I was a hot young actor, in the sense of popular, and then it passed.

I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.

I think the best actors are the most generous, the kindest, the greatest people and at their worst they are vain, greedy and insecure.

I'm a devotee of Stephen Sondheim. I think he's a genius.

Even in the case of a god, audiences - paradoxically - enjoy recognizing the human traits.

The Chinese say, 'It's good to live in interesting times.'

I looked at the 1950 animated film [Cinderella], I read a couple of editions of the fairy tale that I have in my house and all of it seemed to say that there was room for a version that delivered, in this story, which seems to invite a feeling in p eopleand I think that is some version of a classical world.

The best actors, I think, have a childlike quality. They have a sort of an ability to lose themselves. There's still some silliness.

It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.

I don't think Hamlet is mad, nor is he predisposed to be a gloomy or tragic figure.

If it's good art, it's good.

Actually I think 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' could sit very very perfectly in the middle of a Disney world I think.

I think we love the escapism of something like 'Cinderella,' and I think we do with 'Thor.'

I've always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.

We're self obsessed and mad and stupid - not that other people can't be the same way - but the extremes are kind of honest in some mad way. Anyway, I like them.

The glory of 70mm is the sharpness of the image it offers.

I'm very conscious of the fact the directing career has taken some odd turns. Maybe there's enough bulk where I'm now pigeonholed in the 'eclectic box.'

Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein are each obsessed with death. Hamlet's whole story is a philosophical preparation for death; Victor's is an intellectual refusal to accept it.

I choose to be inspired by things that have been done well in the past. So, I don't worry about being compared, because I think that does paralyze you.

I started being interested in acting when I heard the voices of Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness. I've had the great privilege of working with Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Anthony Hopkins. These are people who inspire the work that I do.

I'm just a normal working class boy from Belfast.

I do think that, for instance, we've been very lucky to have theatrical careers and be associated with Shakespeare which sometimes gives you a kind of bogus kudos.

Mozart had a tremendously fertile and creative ear for a catchy tune.

I think that Shakespeare himself raided fairy tales and chronicle writers, and he always looked to people who worked in the mythic genres, whether it was folk tales or popular novels.

So many plays with magic in them that would be a terrific invitation to an imaginative animation team.

I was studying at the Royal Academy of Arts, and I was playing the role of Dr. Ivan Chebutikin in Chekov's 'Three Sisters.' I was about 50 years too young for the part.

I have a pathetic urge at some stage in my life to be able to pull out my wallet and pull out a little card on which it would say, 'Kenneth Branagh, artistic director.'

When you cast someone like Natalie Portman, the character can't just be the love interest.

The director needs to be in command on set because everything crumbles if that's not the case.

I was stuck in a wheelchair playing this deranged villain. I felt this mass amount of rage at being so confined. I thought, 'What can I do that is the direct opposite of this situation?' The only thing I could think of was that I could sing and dance.

I think I do have a way of predicting - not always accurately - what is a nerve-wracking day for actors, what may be a difficult scene or a difficult moment, how small - and it may be down to one line - a thing maybe that is upsetting or undermining a performance.

Many of us live in dysfunctional families, and so even if it's in a fairy tale, or perhaps because it's in a fairy tale, we have a chance to look at that side of our reflected lives differently.

In Northern Ireland, I truly, effortlessly, knew who I was. I knew where I belonged. I felt completely and utterly secure.

The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.

I fondly remember good times working on 'Thor.'

To look out of a car in Scania, you see a painting on the horizontal - one windmill, one tiny farmhouse, acres of beet or grass.

Life is surreal and beautiful.

In 'Henry V,' the story of the assumption of true and responsible leadership by Henry I think is hard-won. He has to lose friends; he has to risk his life.

Variety is very, very good. Going from medium to medium, if you get the chance to do it, from theater to television to film, which are all distinctly different, keeps me sharp. What works in one doesn't work in the other, and you have to be looking for the truth of the performance, whatever way that medium might demand.

I did 'Love's Labour's Lost' in the theater and found it to be riotously funny.

One of the problems with Shakespeare is that you can never give him a ring.

I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.

I only really cast people who are desperate to be in it - who were dying to be in it, whose talent I believed in and were dead ready to do the work that was necessary.

A creative and artistic home is what I've been looking for in the theatre.

Across all Cinderella versions it was clear that the 21st century was not very much in evidence, particularly in the character of Cinderella so it seemed, it felt actually as though it hadn't been done for quite some time, not with the kind of lushness that we could do it with, with an absolute removal of the passivity of Cinderella and finding an amusing way, a lighthearted but significant way of making her proactive and not a girl who's life is about waiting for a bloke.

Actors are the best and the worst of people. They're like kids. When they're good, they're very very good. When they're bad they're very very naughty.

Adults are just children who earn money.

After Frankenstein, I feel as if I want to make a film about somebody having a nice cup of tea.

Aging is the diminishing of early fearlessness.

Even if people are all from the same place, there can be very, very different approaches. It's one of the things I'm fascinated by. It's why I like directing. I like to see how different people approach trying to be truthful, on camera or in the theater, and whether you can make them match up.

Even when a film is finished, when I direct a film, sometimes it's a dark profession, but it requires a peculiar form of courage that I admire.

Everything is important, but there is a weight to these big or expected things and then there is the logistics of them and it's trying to find, while you worry about for instance the ballroom scene, how do you get 500 people to go to the loo in corsets and don't cost you an hour and how do you remember while you're organizing all that to take a breath and say, 'Well the scene is about all of that and it's about [Prince] hand on the small of [Cinderella] back as well' and we need time to do that properly as well.

For all the cynicism that the world contains, people are a little more open to those things that maybe are to do with returning you to some kind of simpler, happier state.

Frankenstein feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms. It appeals to something very primal, but it's also about profound things, the very nature of life and death and birth - about, essentially, a man who is resisting the most irresistible fact of all, that we will be shuffling off this mortal coil.

Helena Bonham-Carter and I sat down to talk about [Cinderella movie] and she said, 'I really want to do it but only one thing I insist on and that's wings.' She had to have wings and [costume designer] Sandy Powell didn't want wings to begin with but had to be talked around, but that was fun.

I don't feel one could even remotely touch the idea of intimidating others, but because I've understood the other side of the experience, I will occasionally, if I smell that could even be in the air for a few minutes, say to the director, "Please, you must tell me anything you want. Please say all the things you think might be terribly hurtful like, 'That was boring.'"

I guess I've done a couple of boys-y movies and on the whole you get bracketed into things you've just done, so it was an imaginative surprise from my Disney family to pull me out of the hat, as it were [in Cinderella].

I noted about Cate Blanchett was her very positive lack of concern for how she turns out in [Cinderella]. She is happy to be a villainess and very pleased to be encouraged as I did with her to reveal this backstory and feel as though this was very human, that this broken heart of hers, if you might regard it that way, would be visible, but she never played for sympathy and I really admired that about her, so she's just there, she just is and uncompromisingly.

I started being interested in acting when I heard the voices of Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness. Ive had the great privilege of working with Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Anthony Hopkins. These are people who inspire the work that I do.

I think that a lot of exciting elements are finding a place where a film is happily, truly about something.

I think the truth is the Marvel fiefdom exists very independently inside the Disney world, inside the Disney universe. They're not resistant to that kind of thing but they have their, you know there is a whole sort of machine energy and momentum that is the sort of creative drive behind the whole universe that has a big impact on the individual films. I'm glad those scenes got out there. And we've got a few interesting deleted scenes on this.

I wanted to have a place and a space, and a building, in which to create a season of work I am here because the idea of a theatrical home is very appealing to me

If you've been to Moscow, it's a really exciting and great city, but it still feels like you should be a little careful about which way you're going to step.

If you've done a brilliant version it becomes something else.

I'm basically quite a cheerful person.

I'm just a foul-mouthed Brit.

It doesn't mean old or younger. I've learned a lot from people much younger than me as well as people much older than me. So I think it's about honesty and generosity.

It's no accident that Cinderella has been in the culture for thousands of years, and in cross cultures. I've traveled a bit recently, and in Russia, they completely believe they own this tale. And in Italy, they feel it absolutely is part of who they are. There is a timeless web to it.

I've heard from quite a few people, you sense that there is an ownership of the [ Cinderella], it was so personal for so many people, so I was interested in trying to work out why that was.

Somehow I know there was something so right about my doing Frankenstein and taking so long over it that I've probably been laying some ghost inside myself. It was a very necessary job for me to do, but it'll take some time to recover from it.

Sometimes it comes out in what I call tricksy behavior. That's not always easy to deal with, but it's fascinating. The key thing is to make sure that somebody's tricks don't trip up somebody else.

The ferocity of passion that is engendered by people when they don't like what you've done is really tremendous. It's intense.

Truth is like most opinions - best unexpressed.