Simon McBurney Quotes

• We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line - the depth of the piece.

  Simon McBurney

  Inspirational, Work, People

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• Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.

  Simon McBurney

  Mind, Theatre, Imagine

  "Simon McBurney: 'I'm going to die'" by Simon McBurney, www.theguardian.com. November 17, 2009.

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• As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.

  Simon McBurney

  Writing, Mean, Theatre

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• The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. That audience looks collectively at what is going on on the stage and collectively imagines that this is real.

  Simon McBurney

  Real, Mind, Theatre

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• The only way that you can keep moving forward, finding other ways of expressing things about this increasingly complicated world that we live in, is by listening and observing not only to life around you but to the other people who are in the room. It's not about a sort of, you know, a sense that you have to be democratic about these things, it's a question of creativity that the process of making theatre is a collaborative process, and it is not in, it is not a question of, you know, I have no interest in paying lip service to it, for me it's absolutely fundamental.

  Simon McBurney

  Moving, Creativity, Complicated World

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• Theatre artists are essentially sort of charlatans and thieves, I mean that's the tradition that we come from, so I have absolutely no, I make no bones about the fact that I steal from here and I take from there, and we all do it, that's perfectly all right, that's the nothing, there's nothing new in the world, there's nothing actually new in the way that you do something, but the point is is how do you take something and use it to articulate what is essentially a core of any given theatrical production.

  Simon McBurney

  Mean, Artist, Theatre

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• I had a teacher in Paris, who said that if an actor forgot what it's like to play as a child he shouldn't be an actor. I've always loved being with children. It's marvellous to see the fresh ways they see the world. Watching them look at a tree or a river helps you to understand something that's very important.

  Simon McBurney

  Teacher, Children, Play

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• We try to place the human body in relation to the image all the time, so it's never a kind of a backdrop, but it's more of ...a much more integrative experience.

  Simon McBurney

  Theatre, Trying, Body

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• I suppose as an actor you become very sensitive to rhythm, not just rhythm as you look at it sort of from the, from the outside as a director might see it, but within yourself you become used to the idea of hearing your fellow actors, responding to them in space.

  Simon McBurney

  Ideas, Space, Theatre

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• I mean I'm talking about playing games, about imagining other people, and it's part of the way that it helps you actually see the world.

  Simon McBurney

  Mean, Playing Games, Talking

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• The more they uncover the more mystery appears to be there.

  Simon McBurney

  Theatre, Mystery

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• Every time I make, I've made a piece of work, I've wanted to get rid of it, obliterate it and do the next thing, because it was never quite what I wanted. I think the moment you think you've arrived is the moment that you should stop.

  Simon McBurney

  Thinking, Theatre, Pieces

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• Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

  Simon McBurney

  Theatre, Each Day, Never Quit

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• I sometimes feel that I am trying to dig in the world around me. I'm involved in another kind of archaeology to look for another kind of truth, and the moment I find, the moment I am separated from that life, the moment I am sort of in a world, every time I have gone out and performed in the, in the cinema for example, if you do two or three films on the trot you suddenly have this impression that you're becoming separate or separated from the world around you.

  Simon McBurney

  Two, Theatre, Trying

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• The other, the other aspect when I say I'm an actor is that as an actor you make this imaginative leap into being somebody else, that's to say the muscle of the imagination is as important as any other of the muscles in your body, and so it is something about this instinct in space and time which for me I associate with being an actor rather than a director.

  Simon McBurney

  Space, Imagination, Important

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• Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.

  Simon McBurney

  Mind, Theatre, Glimpse

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• Normally when people ask me what I do I say I'm an actor, and that's what I always wanted to be and that's the way I approach work even when I'm directing it.

  Simon McBurney

  People, Theatre, Actors

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• I think it was a desire to be able to find my own voice. I think that was the big urge within me.

  Simon McBurney

  Thinking, Voice, Desire

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• People expect the math to be simplified, but I want to surprise them right from the start. 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

  Math, People, Brain

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• One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.

  Simon McBurney

  Writing, Artist, Theatre

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• Any fifth language that you use should be equally used as just another bit of theater language, so that if you have a strong text, then the light should be as strongly part of that text as, for example, the sound it should be or whatever it is that you see.

  Simon McBurney

  Strong, Light, Theatre

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• When you make something, if you are a painter or a writer, a degree, or a sculptor or whatever or a musician, a degree of energy is required to make it, and I'm not sure that it is always aggressive, but when you have a great deal of energy it can appear to be more aggressive than it is. In fact, I mean you can talk about a waterfall being aggressive, but in fact it is just a very powerful forward movement of energy, and although I think sometimes my engine house is a kind of anger.

  Simon McBurney

  Powerful, Mean, Thinking

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• I can't remember a single year of my life when I haven't made a piece of theatre.

  Simon McBurney

  Years, Theatre, Pieces

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