“I don’t live beyond my means. I enjoy luxury and I enjoy the privilege of it, when I can afford it, and I’m in the situation where it’s been given to me, but I’m very conscious of what is wasteful.”

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a ‘desert rats’ tank operator in the Second World War.

I suppose my bodily proportions are quite flattering. I’m ripped, doing something I wouldn’t normally do with my body, or having done to it, involving Watson.

I keep myself amused and others confused

I just increasingly enjoy the quiet moments when I can be on my own with my friends and family, or with a book, having a live experience. That’s really what I crave, and I always have done.

As an actor, to be part of that story’s [Marvel univerce ] terrific. I’ve enjoyed it so much as a fan and now I’m getting to have a go myself.

When I was young I became kind of a party animal. I had a massive crash. My health suffered. I was just overdoing it. That person could not be further from the one who emerged from that earlier experience. I regressed massively.

I’d shift disciplines, whether it was musical instruments or sports or whatever, and it’s the same with that.

There are things that are a given, that you’ve already established, and obviously, visually, certain iconic things that can’t be completely removed, like a certain hat or a certain coat in my case.

New York City is crazy and beautiful and really close to my heart, and I’ve always had dear friends here – family, actually, I would say.

[Season 4 of Sherlock Holmes will be] myopically dark. You’re talking about the end of the universe darkness. You can’t see in front of you and would walk into everything dark.

It’s the same thing, I think, whether it’s breathing or meditation or yoga. And running is a great way of doing it.

Do I like being thought of as attractive? I don’t know anyone on Earth who doesn’t, but I do find it funny. I look in a mirror and I see all the faults I’ve lived with for 35 years and yet people go kind of nuts for certain things about me. It’s not me being humble. I just think it’s weird.

Any irrational fears?no, i’m quite a rationalist. i’m not superstitious, i think life is too full of natural wonders and logical complexities to worry about illogical things.

Do awards change careers? Well, I haven’t heard of many stories where that’s the case. It’s a fun excuse to meet colleagues and celebrate people who’ve done well that year in certain people’s eyes, and it’s nothing more than that.

I’ve been broody since I was 12, but I can’t just get anyone pregnant. It has got to be the right person.

I know he [Julian Assange] is a man of fierce determination, and now living under the strain of house arrest in the Ecuadorean embassy as a “political exile,” as he calls himself.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

If you have a big problem in your life, all that means is that you are being a small person!

I hate rodents. I mean, the House of Commons is completely infested. I will stand on a chair if I see one of the things.

I think every woman in this country will understand what it means to be mansplained to. It happens in everyday life – you know, if you go into a shop, or you’re talking about finance.

The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

To bear the cross means that you refrain from doing what you have the power to do. You are qualified to fulfill your desire, yet you refrain from doing so.

I am a hidden meaning made to defy. The grasp of words, and walk away With free will and destiny. As living, revolutionary clay.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.