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

When people warned me there would be long periods out of work if I became an actor, I couldn’t keep a straight face because that was exactly what I had in mind.

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.

He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.

A guitar riff played on a piano doesn’t come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.

The smell of oak reminds me of summers spent sleeping under canvas, crackling fires and roasted coffee, the soft sound of guitar and voices in unison.

Yes, I took up the guitar when I was about 14 or 15, in high school.

Country music isn’t a guitar, it isn’t a banjo, it isn’t a melody, it isn’t a lyric. It’s a feeling.

Charlie Christians’ contributions to the electric guitar are as big as Thomas Edisons’ contributions to the world.

It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn’t play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.