“Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap.”

Sherlock [Holmes] is on the side of the angels, but don’t think he’s one of them. He uses similar means, but it seems to be for a better purpose, one would hope.

The more charming person is the person who admits the other person is more charming.

Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don’t see yourself.

I was the boy that turned a girlfriend into the most celebrated lesbian on television. I got so much stick for that.

If you can’t jump on board when the ride’s going past that’s it, it usually goes by, so the hugest compliment they paid me was to come back to me. It motivated me to try to fulfill their faith.

People’s hands fascinate me. It’s tempting to look at a businessman’s left hand and see if there’s an indentation from a missing wedding ring. Or maybe there’s a tan line and the skin is pressed down where’s he’s worked a ring off his finger.

I can’t stop traffic on Fifth Avenue, not unless I walk in front of an oncoming cab.

I feel that TV and film feed off each other well. It’s more in the perception of the viewer than it is of the actor.

I’d love to do a noir. I think Steve McQueen is so cool. But a classic film is a classic film, and perhaps the fantasy of being those characters should be left alone. You’re treading on very thin ice.

I haven’t done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you’re most recently famed for, so I’m careful of not repeating myself.

If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people’s expectations, then you can go mad.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

My first, big, silly role at school was as Arthur Crocker-Harris in Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version,’ where my job was to make school-masters’ wives weep with recognition.

I have pitfalls. I have emotional responses to things that are really not about me. They’re about other people.

There’s no shame in stealing – any actor who says he doesn’t is lying. You steal from everything.

You can certainly extend your adolescence. There’s people that are very good at extending it indefinitely.

Many, many individuals will report starting to form their lifelong interests around adolescence. Why that is, researchers don’t fully know. But if you can take a trip down memory lane and see what interested you, that’s at least a clue as to where your interest may begin to develop.

From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence.

I’m obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s.

Most people don’t get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says ‘you can’t say that’ or ‘you shouldn’t say that’ or ‘that wasn’t appropriate’.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.