“It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there’s an email, most of the time there’s a letter, someone wants something of you.”

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

I’m a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

My father was all brain and little heart.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

Personally, I’d never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

There’s no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

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.

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.

The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.

I’m aware of [Doctor Strange] place within the comic pantheon of it all, the Marvelverse, but I don’t email saying, “When are we doing next film?” I’m excited to see.

The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

I wake up to an email from the writers with the new script, and I always get so excited because I know it’ll be better all-around than the script from the week before.

If you want a free email service that doesn’t use your words to target ads to you, you’ll have to figure out how to port years and years of Gmail messages somewhere else, which is about as easy as developing your own free email service.

When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.

The evidence that things are changing fast can be seen in the dramatic increase in the influence of blogging.

I send thank you notes, not emails, even if I’m staying at a friend’s house or something. I’m very old school.