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

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.

Well, it’s wonderful to be identified strongly with my work.

There is always something about the villains that I’m able to play, quote unquote, that isn’t villainous.

I have never felt bereft of anything.

I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.

The biggest surprise in a man’s life is old age.

If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.

I told myself that I would not go back to the camps as an actor ever again, that I was very frightened of wearing a yellow star. It was fear, it was cowardice, I was.

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

Working in film, if you work with great directors, you learn that after every take you must let go. Sitting with my wife at the Academy Awards, we both let the moment just go.

Acting is the only time when I truly maintain the spontaneity that I want to be present at all times.

I never plan to stop acting, I take it very seriously.

Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It’s not as flip, irrelevant, and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.

When a role for a young guy is being offered to me, I think of River Phoenix. It feels like a loss.

The good thing about acting is that it always keeps you on your toes. It’s not like any other job where you can go in and do the same thing as yesterday.

We supposed to be grown, but yet you still acting childish.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.