“My feeling about work is it’s much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa.”

Once in a while it’s good to challenge yourself in a way that’s really daunting.

It’s interesting, for me sappy means sentimental and something that gets you in your heart, gets you emotional. That’s what I mean. Also, of course, it means that I’m slightly setting up the audience that there’s a bit of fun involved, as well.

Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life.

I’d been depressed before, of course. But I’m talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I’m talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog.

I come more to Scotland than I ever used to, so I feel more connected to it, more part of the zeitgeist. You know when you realize you have a choice and I’m choosing my homeland. It’s funny: when you get older these things creep up to you.

It’s actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you’ll be okay.

So if I’m swirling around on some wires, talking to Fred Flintstone, I make it the funnest I can. I also want to be good at it. I don’t want to be a crap cartoon character. I want to be proud I’m a vitamin!

Working with good people is always good.

Kids are more genuine. When they come up and want to talk to you, they don’t have an agenda. It’s more endearing and less piercing to your aura.

I was so scared of going back to the theatre after Hamlet. I didn’t know if I’d do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it.

Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story’s going to end and how it’s going to go. But on television nobody knows what’s going to happen, even the writers.

I’m quite good, though I say it myself, at making strangers feel at ease.

I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I’m a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I’ve lived my life backwards.

There are some days when you don’t feel like being Alan Cumming.

Macbeth was the first play I ever read.

I’m not a big fan of just doing weights. Anything more physical is infinitely better.

There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don’t wish to do.

These people are great because they just say, ‘I’ma do that,’ and they do it. That’s it. There’s no scientifical process.

Schools receive 12% more per student for those doing media studies or psychology than they do for those doing maths. You could change that around, made a premium on doing maths.

You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don’t know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

Most women set out to try to change a man, and when they have changed him they do not like him.