Simon McBurney Quotes

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.

Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.

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.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

I want the Dead Sea, like Masada, to be part of UNESCO's world heritage.

Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.

The cave art of Madison Avenue has been by far the most innovative and educative art form of the twentieth century.

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.

I like to imagine that the Neanderthals were all really good artists.

When we find something new at Giza, we announce it to the world. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are world treasures. We are the guardian's of these treasures, but they belong to the world.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.

I went to the Heidelburg Castle, a 1200-year-old castle, looked around. It was pretty awesome, but you know, they've got a coffee shop in there, and they have some sections closed off. I wanted to see the part where they tortured people, but it was cool, though.

Some of the most important caves, like Lascaux in the Dordogne region in France, have had to be closed down. There had been too many people allowed in, and they left a mold on the walls that is spreading and which can't really be stopped.

The sphinx will always have to be looked after.

The future of that ancient chamber remains in considerable doubt.

High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste.

There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating.

I learned that the first technology appeared in the form of stone tools, 2.6 million years ago. First entertainment comes evidence from flutes that are 35,000 years old. And evidence for first design comes 75,000 years old - beads. And you can do the same with your genes and track them back in time.

It was very clear that this was a very, very old site. There were remains of sod walls. Fishermen assumed it was an old Indian site. Bu Indians didn't use that kind of buildings and houses.

'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.

We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed.

Much has been said and continues to be said of what little concern the Turks had for the Acropolis treasures.

Look at the walls of Pompeii. That's what got the internet started.

Before books, nothing got saved. We don’t know what the cavemen thought about caves even though they tried to write on the walls.