“As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it’ll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.”

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.

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

Aspire, break bounds. Endeavor to be good, and better still, best.

I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it.

The wise man sets bounds even to his innocent desires.

Love is boundless. Human energy is not.

If you play cricket for India, money is bound to come.

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

Loneliness is bred of a mind that has grown earth-bound.

We all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it.