Simon Callow Quotes

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

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 gown.

Many actors have protested about mobile phones going off in theatres, but the real menace now is people texting during a show. It may only disturb a few people around them, but for me, as an actor, when I spot them answering their emails, I am outraged.

Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.

Jesus is absolutely at the centre of Western civilisation and part of my fascination with him is, why? What is it about this particular man and his story?

Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.

I've come to this conclusion: What makes a great actor is great need. A huge need of acting.

I'd like to direct more operas.

I would say critically of myself that I am somebody without secrets. Sometimes acting depends on you having a secret. I don't think I've ever had that.

I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped.

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

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 don't have any big regrets.

I am never bored, never short of anything to do and I don't even ever feel lonely. I am quite gregarious and I get out and about a lot, but sometimes it is just wonderful to be on your own.

I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.

He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing.

He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer.

He always describes his characters' voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They're grotesques really.

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.

Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.