“You don’t go to a town to present the play and have applause at the end of it, but that’s benign conquest. It’s a glorious way of exploring other landscapes and other cultures in a very life-affirming way.”

I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.

In order to inhabit a villain, you mustn’t care what the audience think of you. That’s not why you are there. You mustn’t care for a second whether the audience likes you or dislikes you. Your villain has to be way beyond that.

The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.

I would like to make it known, on this program, loud and clear, that I would absolutely embrace with all five of my arms being a Bond villain.

You cannot learn a lesson of profound forgiveness unless you understand what it is to be wounded and forgive that which has wounded you.

I’m open to any project, but my joyful projects are those through which I can say something and through which I can speak to the an audience of people in the world, and I can be that vehicle through which something can be said, I find that entirely thrilling and joyful.

The leaping Jaguar on the bonnet, to me, makes it look more like a hunter than something that is getting away. It’s a hunter. Richard III definitely would have had a chauffeur driven Jaguar MK X.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

We are adjusters. We empathize, we change rhythm and above all we listen to our fellow actors-if they’re good actors.

They’re a very strange lot actors, very strange people.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I’m waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.

It’s Sir Ben. I’ve not been a Mister for two years.

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.

One of the greatest things drama can do, at it’s best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.

Equal partners aren’t always what we envision as being manifestly equal. Equality can come in many different shapes and sizes and combinations.

Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.

In Eastern culture, people see ghosts, people talk about ghosts, it’s just accepted. And in Western culture it’s just not.