“As an actor you have total rights to privacy and mystery, whatever your sexuality, whatever you do. I don’t see why that has to be something you discuss openly because you do something in the public eye. I have no understanding of why we turn actors into celebrities.”

One of the things I find very difficult about theatre is the repetition – that something can slide away from your original intentions.

I’ve been out to LA a couple of times but, over there, the Grenouille in me always comes to the surface. I feel completely terrified, totally flummoxed, like I don’t understand what the hell is going on. I’ve no desire at all to go back there.

I’ve gone on workout regimes, but I seem to have a system that is very resistant to changing.

Even today, England is a very repressed, repressive country, and there’s pressure to be kind of a certain way, so people do things that ultimately make them sad.

I love the characters I’ve had the opportunity to play.

What I notice about people who are gifted in filmmaking is that they’re great thinkers. They engage with big ideas and they engage with people.

I would have loved to have been a painter or a sculptor. I’m still fascinated by those things.

I am a typical Libran. I tend to see two sides of everything.

I’d like to have a go at directing.

When you have a character to work with, you carry them around in a strange way – they make you look at the world in a different way.

The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws.

We are so mired in the complexity of our reactions to other people that when you come across someone who is asocial, there is a simplicity that is refreshing.

Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.

My intuition comes up with better stuff than my head, I think.

I’m really hopeless with technology – I don’t even have a computer.

I wish that the arts were better supported, and you can’t say that enough times, but I also believe that whatever happens, artists will keep going.

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and that there’s nothing to worry about.

The eyes are the amulets of the mind.

I’m just a potato that won’t quit. I’m a potato with some legs. Some have eyes, I’ve got legs.

Tamaki to Kyoya: I thought you wanted more because your eyes don’t show satisfaction now.

There is only one way in the world to be distinguished. Follow your instinct! Be yourself, and you’ll be somebody. Be one more blind follower of the blind, and you will have the oblivion you desire.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Fix your eye on the ball from the moment the pitcher holds it in his glove. Follow it as he throws to the plate and stay with it until the play is completed. Action takes place only where the ball goes.