“I used to joke that one of the reasons there was a lack of classical work on my CV was because I couldn’t operate in those kinds of trousers. Which is a joke, but it’s actually also true – if I want to appear in public I want to look my best.”

One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don’t. You have compassion, you try and help people. It’s a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.

I don’t normally watch films I’m in because I’m squeamish about that and it takes me quite a long time to recover and I have to go to work. I’m not being coy or cute, but it’s just true.

I’m probably the only person who actually remembers pirate radio.

I got briefly mistaken for someone who might be good in bed, which was very, very good.

If I ruled the world, every woman would have a Chanel suit in her wardrobe.

I don’t want to associate myself with any specific group of politicians.

I do think 3D has seriously improved, since I was a boy. It’s fabulous.

When you are in something that you’re proud of and it’s funny and it’s a good night out and all of those things, there’s nothing quite like it. The rewards are proportionate to the amount of alarm and distress it causes you.

Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.

I like being in kids’ movies, and I like being in family movies.

I have a perfectly average skewed perception of myself. We often don’t know what we’re like.

I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone’s name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff.

To be serious, the things you really want to relive are things like bedtime with your daughter when she becomes incredibly entertaining ’cause she doesn’t want to go to sleep.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it’s not exclusive to the Germans.

I don’t spend a lot of time with anybody.

Actors always talk about taking their work home and I always think: ‘What are you on? You just turn it off. You are at work and then you go home.’

Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment.

Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.

The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.

Religion operates on the principle ‘I obey-therefore I am accepted by God.’ But the operating principle of the gospel is ‘I am accepted by God through what Christ has done-therefore I obey.’

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

You get another person who operates only in an African language and there are many persons who operate only in African languages; he or she is excluded from all the goodies that come with English.