“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.”

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.

There is always something about the villains that I’m able to play, quote unquote, that isn’t villainous.

I have never felt bereft of anything.

I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.

The biggest surprise in a man’s life is old age.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I’m trying to do.

I try to work hard. I’m really proud of what I get to do as a living. I still pinch myself. But I also know it’s a craft, and I can get better at it and learn every time I do it. So I try to work hard no matter what the task is.

One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.

You have to sometimes just run with the problem rather than trying to solve it with hi-tech wizardry and lots of planning.

All the photographers were trying to just get me off, which was hilarious. But it was very, very amusing.

I do have that mindset – that most good art comes from some turmoil, from someone trying to come to some equilibrium, or come up and get a breath.

A woman asking ‘Am I good? Am I satisfied?’ is extremely selfish. The less women fuss about themselves, the less they talk to other women, the more they try to please their husbands, the happier the marriage is going to be.

The pain is always bringing me a lesson. If I listen to the lesson when the pain is manageable, the pain won’t get gargantuan and flatten me entirely, because I will have received the message at the center.