Daily Inspiration Quote by Trevor Nunn

Integrity, in Trevor Nunn's framing, isn't a noble accessory you put on for opening night. It's load-bearing. The line reads like a quiet rebuke to the familiar creative-industry script: be practical, take the gig, smooth the edges, worry about the art later. Nunn flips that logic. If you genuinely feel something "very deeply", the feeling itself becomes an ethical constraint. You can't bargain it away without breaking the very mechanism that makes the work worth doing.

The phrasing matters. "Not possible" isn't motivational-poster bravado; it's a director's practical absolutism. Nunn has spent a career managing compromises - budgets, egos, institutions, audiences - yet he's pointing to the one compromise that destroys the whole enterprise. Sacrificing integrity isn't just "selling out". It's corrupting your instrument: taste, judgment, the ability to say no. Once that goes, the production may still happen, but it happens on autopilot.

There's also a subtle insistence here that integrity isn't performative. It's "your integrity about that" - specific, situational, tied to the thing you care about, not a global brand identity. In theatre especially, where collaboration can blur authorship and responsibility, Nunn is arguing for an interior line that doesn't move just because the room gets loud. The subtext: passion without backbone is just sentimentality, and the industry is full of people fluent in feelings who fold at the first real pressure.