Simon Callow Quotes

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Simon Callow

Profession : Actor

Birth : June 13, 1949

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

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

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

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

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

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

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow

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

Simon Callow