Explore Quotes by Simon Callow

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.

Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 don't have any big regrets.

I'd like to direct more operas.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

He always describes his characters' voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They're grotesques really.

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

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