Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Allam

When the National Theatre was built, it was a public building. If you wander round that building now, there are bits hived off for people who pay more money. That's happening across the arts.

Writing opera off as intrinsically elitist is absurd.

In the theatre, there were plenty of people having sex all over the place - wanting to, and doing it quite successfully - but male violence? Personally, I have witnessed very little. Very, very little.

Theatre has been a part of my education as much as anything else.

I was nervous about a Corbyn government, although I would have supported it because a lot of the policies were good. I was far more nervous of a Conservative government but here it is, we've just got to deal with it.

I played Benedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing' nearly 30 years ago at the RSC, alongside Susan Fleetwood as Beatrice, and I loved every minute.

There's a particularly British way of going about things that I rather like, which is very different to the American way. It comes out of the amateur rep tradition of actors thinking: 'Well, I'm only 26, but I'll put on a beard and have a go at King Lear.'

Many years ago, I was found in compromising circumstances in a dressing room by a security man. The other person was hiding.

Watching your children growing up makes you aware of time passing. You think, 'Oh, God, look at them now! He won't be like this for much longer.'

It must be every critic's dream when you're at something utterly intolerable to actually get up and intervene and make it stop.

I loved the variety of acting: turning your hand to different things and bringing whoever you were to it. There is something almost amateurish about it that appealed to me.

I was very proud of doing Falstaff, because it seemed to go well.

I have a glass of wine. Red. Generally when I'm cooking.

Be ambitious. The great actor, director and playwright Ann Jellicoe commissioned writers like Howard Barker and David Edgar, and put on magnificent, large-scale plays in Dorset that involved the whole community.

That's the thing with acting. There are always loads of people who are more successful, richer, more famous and seemingly able to do anything they want.

I began getting these terrible headaches and I thought 'Oh great, death.' But it was just tension and tiredness.

I've never been to Barcelona, I'd like to go there; also South America.

I don't get mobbed in the street or bothered. Well, people do stop and say nice things. 'I like 'Endeavour,' or, 'I loved The Thick of It.'

What is nice about doing a long-running show is finding a language that gives it some depth.

My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.

For me, acting is like a pool you dive into. If you're lucky, you find what you need, then get out again.

For clothes I go to John Simons on Chiltern Street.

I was in 'Babes in the Wood' at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in the Eighties. I was the villain - the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham.

It's lovely going to Oxford, it's very difficult to film there as you're doing a period drama in a city which is very crowded.

It's curious that apart from the baroque ranting, 'Sarah & Duck' is very similar to 'The Thick Of It' - great characters, excellent writing and lots of humor!

What I loved about Edinburgh was being able to walk to work through a beautiful place.

I've had some bad reviews, but not as bad as the things I could imagine for myself.

A lot of actors are relatively shy people, surprisingly, so acting is a way of not being shy - and being paid not to be shy.

I like the fact that in the theatre nothing is ever finished because you're going to do it all over again tomorrow, whereas in telly once it's wrapped and in the can, that's it.

'The Judas Kiss' was really wonderful. I loved that it concentrated on just two events in Wilde's life, and Rupert Everett was top dollar.

At school I was a disaster academically but being involved in drama helped me to find another pathway into things.

What I don't believe is that DVDs or HD broadcasts can be a substitute for the real thing.

I live near a beautiful park, and when I walk around it, the beauty of it can take your breath away. It makes you realize there is something bigger, certainly bigger than me.

I can do posh.

I remember as a student going to Covent Garden, where they took out the stall seats and you hunkered down on the floor - I heard Pavarotti in Tosca there, and the experience of being in that same room with that astonishing voice has never left me.

I don't think there are roles that would attract me to do a long run in the theatre.

In the early 1970s, I took singing lessons with John Hargreaves, a leading singer with English National Opera, when I was home from university.

Opera requires an enormous commitment. You must devote your whole life to producing that extraordinary sound.

I'm not conscious of having changed my accent.

That's the extraordinary thing about opera: it has the power to elicit a physical reaction. I don't know if I'd have been any good or not, but I do know that I was never committed enough to find out.

I came to theatre as a teenager by going to the National Theatre when it was at the Old Vic and sitting on padded seats in the gallery for 15 pence, which was the price of a bus fare.

It's glorious to get all your food shopping without having to set foot in Tesco.

I like to do a wide variety of things, and acting, particularly in the theatre, has given me that opportunity.

You are in a strange world in pantomime, where you are allowed to step out and talk to the audience and do silly gags. Sometimes I feel like a cartoon character.

I listened to a clip someone had put up of me singing 'I Am What I Am' in the musical 'La Cage aux Folles.' I thought I was absolutely dreadful. It's like when you see photos of yourself at parties - at the time you thought you looked so cool and glamorous but you just look a bit drunk.

Judi Dench told me to shut up once. I was probably going on and on about something, in the way that I do sometimes, so she was being a good friend.

Shakespeare is the best writing ever. It's incredibly rich, dense, expressive language.

I remember once about 10 years ago when I was injured, having to rehearse, and I was walking with a stick. And I was terribly touched by the amount of people willing to give up a seat. You often hear that London is so brusque and rude, but the grace with which people negotiate incredibly crowded spaces is something rather nice.

I don't know who can constantly afford to go and see things. A play, which has five people in it and one set and it cost you 60 quid? And you're in a theatre that really hasn't had a great deal of money spent on it in the last 50 or 60 years? It's kind of weird.

People are just repeating mantras like, 'get Brexit done,' 'strong and stable,' 'dither and delay'. There must be a way of satirizing it, and I long to see it, but it's gone beyond 'The Thick of It.'

Never go dead for a second on stage. Even if you are doing nothing, do it actively.

'La Cage' has got a broad appeal. It obviously appeals to the gay community, but it's also a good, fun show that appeals across a broad audience, a great big mixture.

Lots of people are astounded that I was in the first cast of 'Les Miserables.' Possibly because I look so incredibly youthful.

I had done some acting at school, but I wasn't particularly good at it. What inspired me was going to the Old Vic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the National Theatre was based there.

Try not to worry about embarrassing yourself. That's a lifetime's task.

My chin - I've got another one underneath the first one.

People always use power, that's the unsurprising thing. They use it to try to sleep with who they want to sleep with - women as well as men do that - but I don't understand violence.

Learn your lines so well that you never have to worry about them.

Life will go on - until it doesn't.

I've been saying for about 20 years, 'When am I going to get my cop show?'