"Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible."

"So, whose play is it – Othello’s or Iago’s? Lester accepts that, as usual, the devil has most of the best lines. “Iago is amazing. He picks apart every character and knows what will work on each person. His language and his imagery change depending on who he’s talking to. It’s an incredible study, and you get inside his mind.”
Kinnear nobly suggests shared billing. “In the first half Iago is the engine of the play, but it gets to a point where he’s no longer the puppeteer. He’s just trying desperately to keep all the plates spinning, and it becomes very much this appalling tragedy of a man in absolute torment.” But Shakespeare’s great trick, he suggests, is to make the audience complicit in Iago’s villainy. “He’s afforded seven soliloquies to get them onside. That’s part of the horrendous joy of the play."

"Destroying this world would be the task to set oneself only, first, if the world were evil, that is, contradictory to our meaning, and secondly, if we were capable of destroying it. The first seems so to us; of the second we are not capable. We cannot destroy this world, for we have not constructed it as something independent; what we have done is to stray into it; indeed, this world is our going astray, but as such it is itself something indestructible, or, rather, something that can be destroyed only by means of being carried to its logical conclusion, and not by renunciation; and this means, of course, that carrying it to its logical conclusion can only be a series of acts of destruction, but within the framework of this world."