Simon Callow

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

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

“Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.”

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

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

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

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

“I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped.”

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

“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.”