“There are some directors, lesser in confidence or skill, who make the actor feel very uncomfortable because you feel you’re auditioning for them, every day, and that’s a terrible feeling on the set.”

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.

There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word.

Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.

Well, it’s wonderful to be identified strongly with my work.

Somebody said that I’m a bit like a sponge, grabbing things here and there, soaking stuff up. [As a director] you have to be, really.

I began stealing a lot of ideas from other directors I had worked with.

And I don’t think Director Comey ever adequately explained why he treated the Clinton investigation one way and the Trump investigation another.

It was an echo of Director Comey’s testimony that Trump showed no curiosity, no interest, no concern over the Russia hack.

By his own admission, was discussing the future of Director Comey in that job, and the president brings up whether he is under investigation, highly unethical, at a minimum, unethical.

The most important thing to me is that the president Donald Trump fired the FBI director James Comey all because of the Russia investigation.

I don’t like the sort of hierarchical, totalitarian type of room a lot of directors can find themselves in.

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn’t matter.