“What would I have done if I wasn’t an actor? Probably rob banks.”

I’m Winnie the Pooh – that’s as sexy as I am. I meet ladies and they talk about their family and I talk about my family. It’s about as sexy as a bag of Brussel sprouts.

All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution.Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it’s quite astonishing.

Regardless of what is being discussed . . . the issue is never more important than the quality of the interaction.

You have to learn to hallucinate.

I’m very romantic. I’ve emptied flower shops.

We need to learn to know Him so well that we feel safe when we have left our difficulties with Him. To know in that way is a prerequisite of all true prayer.

Impeccability of the word can lead you to personal freedom, to huge success and abundance; it can take away all fear and transform it into joy and love.

Actors are just entertainers, even the serious ones. That’s all an actor is. He’s like a serious Bruce Forsyth.

It’s your life, live it your way.

One of the things I’ve realised is that I am very simple. My wife asked me once if I loved her. I said: ‘Look love, I’m a simple man. I love you.

I’m a feminist, yes! Very strongly.

I thought if I could capture some of that expression, that depth of emotion, it will make me interesting to watch as an actor.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I’m trying to do.

When I finished my A-levels, I assumed I’d be able to get work as an actor. But I couldn’t. I didn’t get an audition. Nothing. So I thought I’d better train and then the parts would come.

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

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.

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It’s harder.

I don’t want to be like the actor who rehearses everything in the bathroom, then comes to the set and carries on completely uninterrupted while the other actors tiptoe away.

Actors were exploited no less by the capitalist managers than they were by the state.

I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.