“Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you’re going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.”

There is no happiness. There is only concentration.

I was never very happy with performing; it didn’t turn me on much.

I found that speaking live to people, young people, about what I liked and what had been happening to me was very good for me.

I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn’t good enough.

Love goes through different stages. But it endures.

I hope the perception is that I’m an actor, I never intended to be a movie star.

We start to realize that there are anodynes in life that help us through the day.

I have a life and do a lot of things, and so far my work has been my life.

It’s easy to fool the eye but it’s hard to fool the heart.

I don’t like a lot of things like [Iraq], I never did. Being in a position of celebrity and having your words carry such unnatural weight…

I thought, what’s going on? Did some whale get washed up to shore? So I stood up on the table to see what it was, and it was the director.

I’ve always been a bit squeamish when it came to that kind of thing.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful – my personal life suffers.

“What was that, George, what were you doing?” And he said, “They were sleeping.” You’re always trying to catch them.

I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it,

I think what you see [in Salome the play backstage] is an artist having this fit of temperament.

I don’t watch TV.

Make a habit of two things: to help; or at least to do no harm.

Today’s Declaration: I focus on what I want, not on what i don’t want.

Your wealth can only grow to the extent that you do!

I love Britain. It really worries me, the prospect of Ed Miliband propped up by Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP and what that could do to our country. It’s absolutely right that we highlight to voters that potential risk.

I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.

A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

Back of ninety-nine out of one-hundred assertions that a thing cannot be done is nothing, but the unwillingness to do it.