Simon Callow Quotes

33 quotes in 490 categories

• To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.
• When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask…
• Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.
• Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.
• Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.
• Having caught a glimpse of what I might be able to do with my talent, I feel a tremendous obligation to try to fulfill it.
• I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.
• I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.
• I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped.
• I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor.
• I'd like to direct more operas.
• I've come to this conclusion: What makes a great actor is great need. A huge need of acting.
• Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.
• Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.
• My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic…
• Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.
• Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.
• To live another person's life is quite a weird thing.
• Very often my weekends are spent performing on Saturday, on stage in the afternoon and again in the evening.
• When children have grieving parents it's also common for them to feel an obligation to cheer them up and make them happy.

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