Roger Allam Quotes

I am a kid in the dressing-up box at heart.

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.

When I was younger, I was always willing to tell a joke and play out a scene. I would get sticks and pretend they were light sabers. I think it was just at a young age, I was so willing to jump up and perform a little play at the family picnic.

I was an imaginative kid. My sister needed entertaining, whereas I was the one under the table playing with a bit of fluff on the carpet. I was the sort of child who would spend time rolling up balls of all different kinds of fluff and that would be my little family.

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

As a little girl I loved the thought of playing dress-up and getting ready.

Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'

I always wanted my kids to like me and think I was funny, so I made up this story about a kid named Jake and his racecar that he had built from scratch, fully loaded with whatever fantastical gadget he or I wanted him to have at the moment. I loved making up the stories off the top of my head.

My first children's book, 'Tickle Monster,' was inspired by tickling my son one evening.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

I feel it's like being a kid and dressing up, because that's what Baby Jane is.

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.

I have always been drawn to young characters and seeing big tapestries through the eyes of a child. It probably comes from being a father myself and having a young son and seeing the world through his eyes. I write stories that are sort of the exaggerated version of that.

I have a daughter, and fairies meant a lot to her growing up.

I would sit on the swing set and swing literally for two hours, just, like, imagining things. Like, what if this happened, and what if I was this guy?

When I was a kid, I lived in a poor part of Chicago, and I remember my brother and me using towels as capes. My son does it, too.

As children, we did not have toys. We invented characters and animals; we invented stories.

I have daughters. They love Disney princesses.

Before I even started to school, I sometimes would hide behind the radio, which would be sitting on a table, and pretend that I was on the air and try to fool people who came by to listen.

It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

When I was little, I put on plays for my family at Sunday dinner, and I would direct them and have all my cousins, my brother, and my best friends in it. I was a very imaginative and theatrical child and wasn't afraid of being in front of a camera. It was like make-believe to me.

I was thinking that when I have children, that I should always dress as a character for them, so they think their mom is Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella. It would be totally messed up!

I didn't play or like a lot of board games as a child. I liked playing with my G.I. Joes and making up adventures for them.

My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'