Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 don't have any big regrets.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

He had done it as if in preparation for his work as a creative writer: he had mastered the technical aspect of writing, strengthening his verbal muscle, so that when he started to use his imagination, he knew exactly how to express himself.