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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Simon McBurney Quotes

In the theatre, we’re all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.

– Simon McBurney

Mozart’s seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That’s what I’ve found working on ‘The Magic Flute.’

– Simon McBurney

I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong.

– Simon McBurney

For some years, I’ve been very interested in the relationship between science and art.

– Simon McBurney

The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it.

– Simon McBurney

‘Mnemonic’ is a play about memory.

– Simon McBurney

Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don’t talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways.

– Simon McBurney

When I was doing ‘A Disappearing Number’ in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn’t written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.

– Simon McBurney

Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it’s gone.

– Simon McBurney

My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.

– Simon McBurney

In my opinion, there’s nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else.

– Simon McBurney

I’m passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

– Simon McBurney

Everyone sees something different in ‘Endgame’: a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth – not about the play, but about the person watching it.

– Simon McBurney

Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.

– Simon McBurney

The very beautiful and very touching thing about opera singers is they are very willing to do whatever you want. Unlike actors, who constantly want to know why they’re doing something, opera singers will sort of follow you into the fires of hell.

– Simon McBurney

In Japan, sometimes it’s hard to know what you are looking at.

– Simon McBurney

I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it’s a doddle because you’ve got an audience.

– Simon McBurney

I find all food irresistible. I have friends who live in the mountains in France. One of them sells vegetables, and to walk through her garden when everything is bursting out – it’s impossible not to eat something.

– Simon McBurney

‘The Magic Flute,’ I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people’s consciousness.

– Simon McBurney

For years, I wasn’t in the least bit interested in opera.

– Simon McBurney

I’m naturally attracted to something I don’t understand because when you try to deal with something you don’t understand, it opens a door into another world.

– Simon McBurney

We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.

– Simon McBurney

I was keen to stage ‘Faust,’ although I find Goethe’s ‘Faust’ indigestible.

– Simon McBurney

Our lives are a sequence of things. When we’re alive, they’re continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It’s impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: ‘what next?’

– Simon McBurney

When I met Miller, for me it wasn’t a question of wanting to meet him because it was Arthur Miller; it was a kind of astonishment that I could meet someone who was so deeply embedded in the psyche of my artistic development.

– Simon McBurney

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

– Simon McBurney

As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play – and if you’ve forgotten how to play, you shouldn’t be an actor.

– Simon McBurney

When the brain gets lost, it doesn’t stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that’s when things open up. That’s exciting.

– Simon McBurney

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.

– Simon McBurney

The repeated action of working and playing acts like a trowel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops.

– Simon McBurney

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