Simon McBurney Quotes

To me acting originally became an extension of game playing.

Obviously, as an actor, you have to embrace your imagination all the time, but when you're doing one of these films, you have to embrace your most childlike imagination - a sense of wonder and uninhibited playfulness.

I mean, it's fine when you're a kid and someone runs into the playground and goes, 'I've got this great game of pretend,' and you play... As an actor, getting to play, getting to use your imagination and be childish - it is weird but it's wonderful.

At a young age, acting was so inspiring and exciting, because to me it was play - make-believe, pretend.

The most fundamental important thing for me as an actor is maintaining a sense of play. It's so important.

One of my favourite games as a child was to dress up and improvise. Acting seemed obvious.

For me, acting is play. It's just play and it's playing make believe really, really well.

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.

As an actor, you always want to reach back to being a child and having the spontaneity and the imagination of a child.

I was always putting on plays for my family. Usually silly ones. I used my imagination a lot, and it was something that came naturally to me.

All children are natural actors, and I'm still a kid. If you grow up completely, you can never be an actor.

I am an actor and I live in the world of pretend in my working capacity. I live in the world of my imagination.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

Being an actor is an extension of telling a story and I loved story telling as a child.

You know, working as an actor, I'm always working within my own imagination.

I had spent my childhood making up adventures in my head. Then I realized when I went to acting school that there were adventures written down, and you could learn lines, and you could do the adventures for real, not just in your head.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I love the process of discovering a new world - that's why I'm passionate about acting. It's just discovering life, feelings, ideas and thought.

I love to act and put on a show, but you're playing a character all the time. For music, it's really just me being myself.

A large part of acting is just pretending. You get to work with these other great make-believers, all making believe as hard as they can.

What do I love about acting? I love traveling, meeting new people, exploring and just doing what I love.

I've been acting my whole life. I have this huge imagination! I'm a dancer and my mom's a dance teacher, and I was always performing and entertaining people. I'd go to see live theatre or a movie, and I'd become the main character for a few days afterwards. I loved being somebody new for a temporary amount of time.

I love the possibility that anything can happen in any moment with acting. That you have the opportunity to experience lives and adventures that you may not have otherwise.

I love to act because I love trying on other people's skin.

The really best acting is children in a playground or in a backyard. They're just lost in their imagination. The backyard isn't a pirate ship or a jungle, in the same way that the soundstage isn't Shambala.