“Most of the time, I’ve been really fortunate to work with people who are really fun to work with.”

I’ve always considered myself an actor, but I wasn’t making a living as an actor.

Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music.

All I can say is if the part doesn’t delight me in some way, or I can’t feel any compassion for it, I just can’t do it.

Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.

A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you.

Even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did

And then that’s what you have to be. But what I’m looking for is the opportunity to explore what I can do, probing the limits, learning.

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, “It’s better this way.” But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

I don’t love the business. I never wanted to be a part of it. I don’t think any actor does.

” Education does not mean jamming information into somebody’s head. Rather, it’s that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.

There’s a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me.

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn’t use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not.

The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s no such thing as a past or a future – it’s all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.

Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world.

I think it’s so interesting which ways your career can go. I would have been a completely different actor doing a completely different story, and I would have missed ‘Lady Macbeth.’

I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.

And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.

It’s been a journey, the NBA. It’s taken me a lot farther than I ever expected.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.

Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.