“To be serious, the things you really want to relive are things like bedtime with your daughter when she becomes incredibly entertaining ’cause she doesn’t want to go to sleep.”

One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don’t. You have compassion, you try and help people. It’s a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.

I don’t normally watch films I’m in because I’m squeamish about that and it takes me quite a long time to recover and I have to go to work. I’m not being coy or cute, but it’s just true.

I’m probably the only person who actually remembers pirate radio.

I got briefly mistaken for someone who might be good in bed, which was very, very good.

If I ruled the world, every woman would have a Chanel suit in her wardrobe.

I don’t want to associate myself with any specific group of politicians.

I do think 3D has seriously improved, since I was a boy. It’s fabulous.

When you are in something that you’re proud of and it’s funny and it’s a good night out and all of those things, there’s nothing quite like it. The rewards are proportionate to the amount of alarm and distress it causes you.

Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.

I like being in kids’ movies, and I like being in family movies.

I have a perfectly average skewed perception of myself. We often don’t know what we’re like.

I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone’s name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it’s not exclusive to the Germans.

I don’t spend a lot of time with anybody.

Actors always talk about taking their work home and I always think: ‘What are you on? You just turn it off. You are at work and then you go home.’

I’m not famous for my back story investigations; I’m lucky that I work with good writers and it’s usually in the script.

When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I’m going to bring up my daughter so that she’s free and can stand on her own feet.

When you have a daughter, you want to protect her from the things that I’ve seen out there, you know, the things that’s out there that ain’t good for her. It’s a crazy world we live in.

Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved…Freedom is…not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

You know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop – the idea that we’re going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho.

My kids are always like, ‘Why do people always want to take pictures with you?’ and I’m like, ‘Because I’m your Dada, and you’re my daughter. That’s why.’ It’s definitely mostly because of ‘Game of Thrones.’

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‘We’re black.