Quotes from Simon Callow

But this was just filling in the time pleasantly. He wants someone to worship, not to know.

Acting, Dickens and his contemporaries believed, was the art of gesture, no more and no less.

Why should I waste my time going to college and teaching those goddam professors what I know?

My faith in the people governing us,' he had said, 'is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed, is, on the whole, illimitable.

gradually he realizes that memories, however oppressive, are part of what it is to be human.

Clearly, under all the success and the radiance and the easy charisma, there were rumblings of a deeper discontent.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I'd like to direct more operas.

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.

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.

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.