“But if one could go back in time, I’d love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who’s one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in ‘Rio Bravo’.”

Because, let’s face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.

Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave.

No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it’s always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It’s a wonderful journey to take.

You can’t reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

I don’t believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods.

I think the fact that I’m so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn’t be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman – I’ll kiss a frog if you like.

When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.

My parents were marvelously educated people.

I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character.

Motor racing is like one big family, ultimately, and when you come back to it, that’s really what it feels like.

My mum passing away wasn’t funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

Every fish fertilizes the water in a way that generates the plankton that ultimately leads back into the food chain, but also yields oxygen, grabs carbon – it’s a part of what makes the ocean function and what makes the planet function.

No matter what is thrown at them, no matter how deep the hole, they find a way to bounce back and overcome adversity.

I have come up at the end of a dive, and the boat was not where I left it. I had to take care of a buddy who did panic. But I was confident the boat would come back.

If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.

If we could magically transport ourselves back to the young Earth, when it was only a billion years old or two billion years old or three billion years old or four billion years old.