“It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.”

I’ve never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there’s just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.

Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There’s very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I’m lucky enough that it’s reasonably mild in my case.

You don’t sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn’t work like that.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

I don’t watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business – which at least does us all some good.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

I’m a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

My father was all brain and little heart.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

Personally, I’d never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

There’s no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

So much of a stand-up’s life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

I feel the same way about all my friends. To me, the exact relationship between me and someone else doesn’t matter much. But people want to label everything… So I guess I seem indifferent in that way.

It took us five hours to reach Tokyo, but I wasn’t bored one bit. I didn’t really get to hear so much about Nana. But I knew I would have loved… To hear what Nana had to say about herself. – Nana Komatsu

There will come a day when the phone doesn’t ring as much as it used to.

I never realized how much you hurt.

Love is the way I feel for you, the way you fill something inside me whenever you so much as walk into the same room.

In my own personal time, horror films freak me out too much, so I tend to steer clear of watching horror films on my own.

I think that training is important. I think you need to learn as much as you can learn.