Simon Callow Quotes

#1. I think actors go along a continuum from Simon Callow down to kind of Ross Kemp, and I like to think of myself as the Ross Kemp of comedy. He's very good in 'East Enders' because he plays a version of himself. I think I can play a version of myself - that's about all I can do.

Jo Brand

#2. 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.

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

#4. 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.

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

#6. Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.

Simon Callow

#7. 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.

Simon Callow

#8. 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.

Simon Callow

#9. To live another person's life is quite a weird thing.

Simon Callow

#10. 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 its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.

Simon Callow

#11. 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.

Simon Callow

#12. Very often my weekends are spent performing on Saturday, on stage in the afternoon and again in the evening.

Simon Callow

#13. 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.

Simon Callow

#14. The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

#16. There is something essentially sanguine about me, which I am inclined to attribute to the fact that I was born by caesarean section. It must affect you.

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

#21. I'd like to direct more operas.

Simon Callow

#22. 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?

Simon Callow

#23. 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.

Simon Callow

#24. 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.

Simon Callow

#25. Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.'

Simon Callow

#26. 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.

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

#29. You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

#32. When children have grieving parents it's also common for them to feel an obligation to cheer them up and make them happy.

Simon Callow

#33. I don't have any big regrets.

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

#35. 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.

Simon Callow