“Sometimes the songs you think will be best don’t turn out to be best.”

Acting, music, painting… it’s very subjective. So what I might think is a great actor, you might think is not a very good actor at all.

I don’t think I’d have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I’d known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.

Rather than thinking, ‘If I do this, and in five years I’ll be where I want to be,’ you’re better just doing something that makes you happy now.

A lot of ideas took us to dead ends or we found the tone wasn’t just right. I think we discovered very quickly this wasn’t just a song to end The Battle of the Five Armies – it was a song to say goodbye to Middle-earth.

I really like acting but, just now, the more I read a script I find myself thinking I’d like to direct rather than act.

People are scared to make something that doesn’t look like another film that made a lot of money. It means we get ‘Four Weddings And A Funeral’ made again and again.

The innocent on a quest, the pretender, an inanimate object that holds evil – it’s really strange that these themes are there in so many different countries’ folklore.

I was probably about fourteen I think, and probably like every boy who’s fourteen that writes a song, it was about a girl. It was about a girl who I really liked, but she didn’t like me as much as I liked her. I think most guys go through that.

But you talk to most filmmakers and it is six, seven, eight years trying to get things off the ground. It is incredible really.

For me, what makes great actors, always is how truthful they are to the character and the story and the emotion that they’re trying to tell.

I’d like to win a Booker Prize for writing. A Nobel Peace Prize for my work in peace… and I think that’ll probably do.

Hobbits are a lot like Scots. It’s all about nature and enjoying their land, which is a very Scottish thing.

Life in LA is not lying in the sun for months. It is having a 4pm meeting and leaving at noon to sit in traffic for four hours. Its not glam.

He [Viggo Mortensen] was standing behind the camera throwing the apples … And I’ve never seen him so happy.

I like people like Ani DiFranco, a band called Elbow, of course John Lennon, George Harrison, Barry White. I have a lot of different influences and hopefully they all come together and make some sense.

I may have aimed too high sometimes, asked too much of myself and demanded too little from those around me.

It’s nice to think that we have in ourselves the energy. It’s somewhere, but it’s sleeping sometimes. I try to wake it up when I need it.

Sometimes I say, If I had seen some masterpieces, maybe I wouldn’t have dared start. I started very – not innocent, but naïve in a way.

I was free always. I could work without the money, to film this and that. But this is another point, because now I’m alone, and I can just use it when I want.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don’t want time to come back.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn’t have anything to do with me, but it’s just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

And sometimes we aspire to have these ideas in our heads of what perfection is.