Quotes from Timothy Spall

I love a cinema with two people in it. Love it! Absolutely love it!

What character actors want to do is investigate new types of people and present them in all their idiosyncrasies, psychological complexities, and contradictory stupidities. That has been one of the great delights over our seven collaborations.

There's two types of character actors. There's character actors who play all different characters. Or there's actors who always play the same part; they're just a bit funny-looking.

I feel a bit uncomfortable talking about awards.

I think anything that increases your understanding of the human condition... I think age and life, if you're lucky, makes you think deeper, and the other thing it makes you realize is that you never stop learning, and you never lose your fear of getting it wrong.

There's nothing like a little bit of unemployment to kick the stuffing out of you when things are going well.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

When you're doing a film, your agent and manager spend hours - days - talking about contractual obligations. If you turn up for work and ask for a peeled grape on top of foie gras but you don't get it, you can't get annoyed.

Time itself is talked about as something that is unusual, that there could be a parallel time.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.

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

I know what I like when I see it, but no way have I ever become interested in learning about it.

It's an odd world.

If one wants to measure oneself by the facile accruement of awards, then I've done very well.

I don't play the lottery, as I feel I have been really lucky in what I have been able to do in my life, but if I did win, it would be the usual things - helping out the people I love. I'd probably squander a few quid on all sorts of unnecessary crap!

I know I work quite hard at making people like me.

If you are afflicted with an artistic feeling, it's just perfecting something.

In 1996, when I was being treated for leukaemia, at one point I had a vicious infection that was trying to claim me. Mercifully, due to love and expertise, I pulled through.

You create a proto-human being out of people that you've encountered in your life, and you start building up this person and start becoming this person.

It's my job to manipulate feelings.