The meaning of art in a time of suffering, a time of war, is much more intense. People are more focused.
I work in theater, so I am always working in front of empty chairs. They represent a future presence. They are never just chairs.
Many have asked me, 'Why have a film festival in the middle of a war?' But they have it backwards. The question is, 'Why have a war in the middle of a film festival?'
'Hamlet' is a universal story that concerns us all. These issues do not concern only Muslims, but all people equally, showing that we all share the same problems regardless of religion, nation and culture.
Yes, I am mad - like the Marquis de Sade was mad, like Giordano Bruno was mad, like Antonin Artaud was mad.
Art can articulate new ideas.
I grew up in adoration of writers like Hemingway, George Orwell, Anna Akhmatova, and that has always been my idea about the artist - that you have to be a brave and freedom-loving person.
To come to the theatre, people have to make arrangements, change their clothes, find a babysitter, find a parking space - and they don't come after hard work to hear a lecture.
My theatre is not a conventional one. It is bold, serious, funny, confronting. It is anything but boring.
Football is probably the most democratic human activity. It belongs to everyone... to poor and rich, illiterate and educated, to all races, cultures, and nations.
In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.
We need the daring visions. To go to theatre must be different than to go to shopping. We adventure together, we journey through the mindful and emotional landscapes, we create together an event, unique and unrepeatable.
The industry of political conflict is the biggest industry in Bosnia, and it is still not exhausted. What is needed is to replace these two industries - the industry of political conflict, the industry of human rights - with normal, creative walks of life.
Art is a primal need - even under siege, especially under siege.
War and peace-making, human rights, humanitarian issues have become industries, but nobody looks closely at human greed, at the arms industry and the manufacture of landmines. Art has to take a wider view. The problems of Ireland are my problems, too.
Culture is a part of basic human nature, of deep humanity.
Life is not just food, it's something spiritual.
People have to have food for their souls.
My company is called East-West Theatre precisely because Sarajevo is this city on the border between East and West, the place where the Great Mosque and the Catholic Cathedral and the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral stand almost within touching distance of each other.
People come to the theatre in search of a real encounter with other human beings, and we must give them what they come for. Our capacity to do that is the measure of being human. And if the price is that we sometimes say something not very pleasant - well, that's precisely why people want us, in the end: because we speak the truth.
