“I’m convinced that had I not changed my name, I don’t think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had.”

Millions of children are disempowered and we need to empower them.

What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it’s a science. It’s neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.

When you drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting.

I’m very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.

I don’t honestly think people know what acting is.

I never read anything in print about me. It started with not reading reviews and with the greatest respect to my publicist here, I never read interviews. I was there when I gave them. I never read reviews. I was there when I did the jobs – so I’m totally immune. I live in a bubble.

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

There have not been any troughs as regards my work. There’s never been a trough of my assurance.

If the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling.

John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.

I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy… It’s a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.

Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.

Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn’t going to work.

As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I’d still be alive by now.

There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word.

Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.

A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

I used to think I was hitting a draw at times, and the ball was still curving to the right! I still prefer to play a little fade, but I’ve had to recalibrate my visuals.

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

I had plenty of power, and I knew how to play the curve, but I was a tour player who was watching his tee shots peel 30, 40 yards to the right.

The breaking wave and the muscle as it contracts obey the same law. Delicate line gathers the body’s total strength in a bold balance. Shall my soul meet so severe a curve, journeying on its way to form?

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.