Explore Quotes by Simon Callow

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 actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.