“I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.”

I’ve been reading the books. It’s the origination, it’s the primary source. You should always go back to the books.

I had a very sparse comic upbringing – not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

I’m not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying ‘Hi’ is going to be even more difficult because they won’t know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen.

[Doctor Strange] gets scraped off the floor and then thrown right down to hell again and then slowly pulls himself back up.

I think now with fundamentalists, people who treat belief with a total lack of humor or empathy for any other viewpoint than their own – they, to me, are the enemy. And those people are born out of desperate extremes.

It’s difficult because nothing’s preordained by plan and you can’t control it. That’s one of those joys and thrills and nerve-racking realities of being an actor. A lot has to do with luck, no matter what your talent or contribution can be.

It’s very easy to be cynical about any kind of interference in things that are beyond our skill set.

I think it’s fair to say that, yeah, I’m playing Doctor Strange, I get there.

I don’t want to miss things.

The armoury of having any academic education does not necessarily set you up for being a good or better actor.

I remember very clearly someone saying, ‘Don’t shake hands with the cactus,’ and I thought, ‘Well, why not? What could possibly go wrong?’ Shaking hands is a friendly gesture.

When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don’t really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it’s not fair that others aren’t doing exactly what you’re doing. I do have that.

Someone will always hate what I say. There’s always going to be somebody spitting blood about my wooden-faced, toffee-named, crappy acting.

I drag a lot of stuff round with me that I don’t need.

I try to work hard. I’m really proud of what I get to do as a living. I still pinch myself. But I also know it’s a craft, and I can get better at it and learn every time I do it. So I try to work hard no matter what the task is.

What makes a good animated movie is being able to balance adult and knowing in-jokes and also just out and out funny things that make all people laugh. The idea that it’s actually something that will appeal to a family, that’s the trick.

It’s rumored that doing well in real estate is to be able to close a deal. I did not find that to be the case for myself, I was probably the worst closer out there and I didn’t find that was true of my top super stars either.

No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

A pregnant woman facing the most dire circumstances must be able to count on her doctor to do what is medically necessary to protect her from serious physical harm.

It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.

I feel so often that depression is a signal of more that wants to be expressed within you. There is an innate impulse in everyone to express more of who they truly are, and you get depressed when you don’t feel you’re able to do that.

Without encryption, you and I wouldn’t be able to do our banking online.

We want to be able to sell you anything, anywhere, any time you want it.

I think I’ve had the longest career of strength, focus, and still being able to sell records.