Top 77 Simon McBurney Quotes
#1. I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.
Simon McBurney
#2. I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with 'Endgame,' where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth.
Simon McBurney
#3. I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level.
Simon McBurney
#4. Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?'
Simon McBurney
#5. I mean I'm talking about playing games, about imagining other people, and it's part of the way that it helps you actually see the world.
Simon McBurney
#6. Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.
Simon McBurney
#7. 'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.
Simon McBurney
#8. One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.
Simon McBurney
#9. Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone.
Simon McBurney
#10. As an actor, it's much easier for me to get work in the movies because nobody knows who I am except for the work that I've done in another movie. I really enjoy that.
Simon McBurney
#11. When my mother was dying, I cooked for her. One of the things I realised was that the smell and look of the food was key. I concentrated on how it looked on the plate. Even if the amount was small, it gave her a nourishment of a different kind.
Simon McBurney
#12. My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.
Simon McBurney
#13. I remember the fact that milk was delivered every day by a milkman. In summer, my mother would make what now seem in my middle-aged imagination the most delicious iced milkshakes.
Simon McBurney
#14. For some years, I've been very interested in the relationship between science and art.
Simon McBurney
#15. The repeated action of working and playing acts like a trowel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops.
Simon McBurney
#16. Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.
Simon McBurney
#17. In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here.
Simon McBurney
#18. For years, I wasn't in the least bit interested in opera.
Simon McBurney
#19. Any fifth language that you use should be equally used as just another bit of theater language, so that if you have a strong text, then the light should be as strongly part of that text as, for example, the sound it should be or whatever it is that you see.
Simon McBurney
#20. Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.'
Simon McBurney
#21. I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible.
Simon McBurney
#22. When I was doing 'A Disappearing Number' in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn't written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.
Simon McBurney
#23. I don't really think about a visual aspect to the work at all; I just think about making the piece. And everything that occurs visually comes out of the subject matter you are dealing with so that I find it difficult to treat the visual element as a separate entity.
Simon McBurney
#24. Normally when people ask me what I do I say I'm an actor, and that's what I always wanted to be and that's the way I approach work even when I'm directing it.
Simon McBurney
#25. I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat?
Simon McBurney
#26. I allow people to create, but I'm also marshalling everybody, which is difficult for my creativity, as I'm like a referee. Everybody else is kicking a ball. It is very messy. From the mess, though, you refine what is there.
Simon McBurney
#27. The more they uncover the more mystery appears to be there ...
Simon McBurney
#28. With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time.
Simon McBurney
#29. I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience.
Simon McBurney
#30. I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong.
Simon McBurney
#31. I think it was a desire to be able to find my own voice. I think that was the big urge within me.
Simon McBurney
#32. The very beautiful and very touching thing about opera singers is they are very willing to do whatever you want. Unlike actors, who constantly want to know why they're doing something, opera singers will sort of follow you into the fires of hell.
Simon McBurney
#33. So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.'
Simon McBurney
#34. The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it.
Simon McBurney
#35. Every time I make, I've made a piece of work, I've wanted to get rid of it, obliterate it and do the next thing, because it was never quite what I wanted. I think the moment you think you've arrived is the moment that you should stop.
Simon McBurney
#36. As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play - and if you've forgotten how to play, you shouldn't be an actor.
Simon McBurney
#37. We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.
Simon McBurney
#38. In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.
Simon McBurney
#39. When I met Miller, for me it wasn't a question of wanting to meet him because it was Arthur Miller; it was a kind of astonishment that I could meet someone who was so deeply embedded in the psyche of my artistic development.
Simon McBurney
#40. When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.
Simon McBurney
#41. Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic.
Simon McBurney
#42. In the theatre, because you're all looking at the same thing in the same space, consciousness is no longer individual. There is a unified consciousness. Until you look and project what is happening, it doesn't exist; the audience are the ones making the theatre, not the players.
Simon McBurney
#43. I've had various people close to me die, and I don't necessarily find the idea of death purely depressing.
Simon McBurney
#45. My experience of my father's death was that it was still taboo; nobody would meet me after my father died because they didn't know what to say.
Simon McBurney
#46. My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.
Simon McBurney
#47. We try to place the human body in relation to the image all the time, so it's never a kind of a backdrop, but it's more of ... a much more integrative experience.
Simon McBurney
#48. I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor. I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.'
Simon McBurney
#49. As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.
Simon McBurney
#50. 'The Master and Margarita' is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he's not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.
Simon McBurney
#51. I suppose as an actor you become very sensitive to rhythm, not just rhythm as you look at it sort of from the, from the outside as a director might see it, but within yourself you become used to the idea of hearing your fellow actors, responding to them in space.
Simon McBurney
#52. Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.
Simon McBurney
#53. In Japan, sometimes it's hard to know what you are looking at.
Simon McBurney
#54. For me, acting is like a holiday. When you're directing, you have a strong sense of responsibility for others. It's exciting but exhausting, especially when you're like me: always wanting to break the rules.
Simon McBurney
#55. Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.
Simon McBurney
#56. In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.
Simon McBurney
#57. My work is not generally in the commercial sector. However, I'm not worried by the commercial sector. I refuse to work in any other way except the way that I work.
Simon McBurney
#58. Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.
Simon McBurney
#59. Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.
Simon McBurney
#60. Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.
Simon McBurney
#61. I don't tend to get cast in the theatre much. People assume I come with all this baggage. But they do cast me in films. In films, I'm a nobody.
Simon McBurney
#62. We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line - the depth of the piece.
Simon McBurney
#63. I don't have what German directors call 'a concept' - a solid, fixed sense of the pattern that you should impose on the given work. I always get the feeling that I am raking up the earth rather than laying down the concrete.
Simon McBurney
#64. I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.
Simon McBurney
#65. There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light.
Simon McBurney
#66. I can't remember a single year of my life when I haven't made a piece of theatre.
Simon McBurney
#67. Theatre is about the collective imagination ... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.
Simon McBurney
#68. Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don't talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways.
Simon McBurney
#69. I'm naturally attracted to something I don't understand because when you try to deal with something you don't understand, it opens a door into another world.
Simon McBurney
#70. I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.
Simon McBurney
#71. In my opinion, there's nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else.
Simon McBurney
#72. Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.
Simon McBurney
#73. I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space.
Simon McBurney
#74. The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.
Simon McBurney
#75. The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.
Simon McBurney
#76. 'The Magic Flute,' I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people's consciousness.
Simon McBurney
#77. I find all food irresistible. I have friends who live in the mountains in France. One of them sells vegetables, and to walk through her garden when everything is bursting out - it's impossible not to eat something.
Simon McBurney
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