Quotes from Timothy Spall

I don't enjoy the theatre. I don't go. Don't like going in the back door or the front.

It doesn't bother me one iota that most of my career has been playing people who are not that - well, let's say that people wouldn't aspire to be like them.

You're trying to form this human being that will fit the bill, and the human being becomes a hand, and the research is a glove, and you try to bring this character together into the research, mesh it, and create this person that is the sum total of all that endeavor.

These people I play are not usually wish-fulfillment characters.

Imagination is a beast that has to be put in a cage.

I played Othello at RADA - blacked up. I didn't know it was going to be offensive now!

There's posh character actors. For God's sake, Olivier was one of the greatest character actors in the world. Hamlet, Shylock, Othello - Othello! Whether you like it or not.

When I was born, my dad was a scaffolder, and my mum worked in a chip shop. Then my mum taught herself how to be a hairdresser and ended up with her own salon; my dad became a postman and then a counter clerk. Our first house didn't have a bathroom.

When I was at school when I was 16, I was in a quandary because I didn't know whether I wanted to join the army - I had this terrible desire to be a tank driver in the Royal Tank Regiment, genuinely - or whether I wanted to go to art college because half of me wanted to be in the army, and the other half of me wanted to be a surrealist.

You're immortal, aren't you, until you get a little peek over the precipice. The thought of death...You're not supposed to start pondering it until you're old. And there's nothing like being told you've got a life-threatening disease to concentrate your mind on that.

I think people's imaginations are being neutered by the amount of access they can get to information just by pressing a button.

Life is a massive amount of feelings with the occasional profound engagement with intellect. As I get older, I hope the intellect takes over.

Life is not all about profundity. Life is about little things that piss you off, little triumphs, little defeats. So, you can't spend all your time being profound.

You can't live your life in a state of profundity, because you're never going to get anything done, and you're just profound.

If I can't get hold of someone I love, I'll assume they're being tied to a radiator by al-Qaeda rather than their battery's run out. I'm quite a worrier.

I believe that a world that doesn't have some kind of magic in it wouldn't be worth living in.

The older I get, the more I feel that's all we are: a big bunch of feelings and instincts all wrapped up in some brief encounter with intellect.

I'm sick of having an opinion on everything. Getting older, you learn all sorts of things you're supposed to, but I feel like it's time, when you get older, through experience, to... I started to feel quite... what's the word? ... intimidated by seeing both sides of everything.

I was always insecure about the way I looked.

You invent this massive lagoon of information without any pressure to do anything apart from create this person, a person that might fit the bill that is the character that is emerging from the research.

I didn't know whether to join the army or go to art college.

My wife... now travels with me everywhere - not because she nearly lost me, but because my kids are all grown up and my son is now a very successful actor, Rafe Spall.

As you get older and more thoughtful, you carry stuff with you. Your kids get older, you take on their sorrows, you enjoy their triumphs. Life doesn't always go to plan.

My job as a character actor is to make me fit the character, to serve the character. To present this human being who turns up in a piece of film or entertainment that's going, you know, exist as if it might exist after the film is finished and it existed before the film has started.