“Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn’t there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can’t.”

In cinema, the leading player is the director.

I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it’s such an extraordinary part of our lives.

Millions of children are disempowered and we need to empower them.

What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it’s a science. It’s neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.

When you drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting.

I’m very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.

I don’t honestly think people know what acting is.

I never read anything in print about me. It started with not reading reviews and with the greatest respect to my publicist here, I never read interviews. I was there when I gave them. I never read reviews. I was there when I did the jobs – so I’m totally immune. I live in a bubble.

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

There have not been any troughs as regards my work. There’s never been a trough of my assurance.

If the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling.

John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.

I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy… It’s a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.

Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.

Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn’t going to work.

As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I’d still be alive by now.

When I entered federal parliament at the end of 2007, I was appointed parliamentary secretary for disabilities.

The shallow end of hope is usually the deep end of grace.

A life whose beginning we do not remember, and whose end we do not know.

Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.

In the end, your creativity — perhaps even your outrageousness — will determine the final result.

I once asked him what came at the end of the sentence… and he said “parole”.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment.

It is an artist’s duty to be on the wrong end of the see-saw.