“The number of choices you make in the event that you see on stage, those choices are sometimes largely determined by the rehearsal process and the experiments that you go through and the choices that you make in the rehearsal room, not in front of an audience.”

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.

I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew.

When I choose a role it’s either because I recognise the man, or that I’m very curious to know him. If I neither recognise nor know him, then it is better that I don’t play him.

Our creator says, ‘Here’s your birth and here’s your death’ – and the rest are the things you learn on your journey. This was my experience – and the choice is, I can lay in the misery, or choose to learn from it and move on.

In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities.

The reason I make art is because I get to make a choice about who I am, what I do, and what I put out into the world, the footsteps I leave behind.

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.

We don’t need to set this up as we either take a bunch of refugees who will be infiltrated with terrorists, I guarantee you. For them not to be would be terrorist malpractice. And we need to – to choose the right choice, not these false choices.

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.

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.

Every time you have to make a choice about anything, think Does this go toward or away from what I want? Always choose what goes toward what you want.