“As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I’m greedy for beauty.”

I’m one of those weird people who doesn’t even own a computer.

Try to be in the day. Try to not have today stolen from you by anxiety about yesterday or tomorrow.”

Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect.

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.

I don’t even own a car.

I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

I love playing half squid/half crab guy because you can get away with a level of acting that if you tried it anywhere else they’d arrest you for crimes against acting.

I wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I’d meet beautiful women in the rain.

In one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it’s not just an attempt at naturalism. It’s stylised and it’s heightened, to great effect. It’s elegant and it’s funny and that’s the way to my heart, frankly.

Whatever you do, don’t smoke’. I have had to recover from that and been lucky that I have been able to stop.

You have all these plans to act, and maybe do it rather elegantly, and then they turn the rain machine on.

The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.

Hunger is almost like something the West does. It’s almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.

I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, “Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true.” I like those kinds of backgrounds.

Somebody asked me recently, ‘Have you done a lot of plays?’ I thought hang on. .

I think in the old days, everybody used to act really quickly because Hollywood was built by theatre people.

I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

I didn’t know much about my Native American ancestry, but as I got older I became more interested in it.

And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.

That’s what love does. When it’s right, it makes you more than you were, more than you thought you could be.

You know what I think about violence. For me it is profoundly moral -more moral than compromises and transactions.