“I’m sort of focused on my long-term goal of carving out a career that’s for life, rather than being a flash in the pan.”

The more charming person is the person who admits the other person is more charming.

Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don’t see yourself.

I was the boy that turned a girlfriend into the most celebrated lesbian on television. I got so much stick for that.

If you can’t jump on board when the ride’s going past that’s it, it usually goes by, so the hugest compliment they paid me was to come back to me. It motivated me to try to fulfill their faith.

People’s hands fascinate me. It’s tempting to look at a businessman’s left hand and see if there’s an indentation from a missing wedding ring. Or maybe there’s a tan line and the skin is pressed down where’s he’s worked a ring off his finger.

I can’t stop traffic on Fifth Avenue, not unless I walk in front of an oncoming cab.

I feel that TV and film feed off each other well. It’s more in the perception of the viewer than it is of the actor.

I’d love to do a noir. I think Steve McQueen is so cool. But a classic film is a classic film, and perhaps the fantasy of being those characters should be left alone. You’re treading on very thin ice.

I haven’t done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you’re most recently famed for, so I’m careful of not repeating myself.

If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people’s expectations, then you can go mad.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

My first, big, silly role at school was as Arthur Crocker-Harris in Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version,’ where my job was to make school-masters’ wives weep with recognition.

I have pitfalls. I have emotional responses to things that are really not about me. They’re about other people.

There’s no shame in stealing – any actor who says he doesn’t is lying. You steal from everything.

Scott Derrickson breathes humour into a character with a very strong identity in the ’60s and ’70s, that psychedelia era of Eastern mysticism meeting the West.

Maybe I’m naive, but I subscribe to the idea that nobody is actually making strategic decisions about their career. Trying to do that would be like playing three-card monte on Canal Street.

The NBA wasn’t a big deal at that time, so it wasn’t really in my career plans.

10′ was amazing! I had no career before ’10’ and then all of a sudden I was able to do pretty much whatever I was able to do in the business.

I have competed before empty stadiums a lot in my career.

I have no idea where my career is going. I just make the best music that I possibly can.

People are afraid of things they don’t understand. They don’t know how to relate. It threatens their security, their existence, their career, image.

When I hit 11 so did the careers of Dylan and the Stones. A year later it was the Who and the Kinks.

I always not only want push the envelope in my career but I also have an itch for going against the grain.