I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn't have. And, in hindsight, I've almost always been wrong when I haven't listened to myself.

When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else!

I hate the domestic life.

Shoes are strange things. If you take your shoes off in a situation in which you're vulnerable, you'll feel 10 times more vulnerable.

The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to give my time to.

When I do work, I feel the same sort of urgency as I ever did. If I didn't feel that, I don't think I would wish to be doing it. I wouldn't really see the point.

I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.

At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.

There's nothing worse than finding yourself in a situation, a very demanding piece of work, and knowing that you're not a true ally to the person who's in charge of all that.

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.

Periodically over the years I've always taken periods of time away from acting.

When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.

The West has always been the epicentre of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It's to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon.

I like things that make you grit your teeth. I like tucking my chin in and sort of leading into the storm. I like that feeling. I like it a lot.

The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.

I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

I can't re-examine work I did in the past with pride.

I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.

I like to learn about things.

It must be hard interviewing actors.

I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets.

I'm woefully one-track-minded.

Films exhaust me, they do, and I often want nothing more to do with them, but I'm continually surprised at the resurgence of the impulse to come back and do it all over again.

I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.

I don't feel my son should pay the price for what I do.

If people take an interest in you and they think there's half a chance, they might hang on. It's dreadful.

I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.

At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.

I broke things to get attention.

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

Actors should never give interviews.

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.'

I'm not picky, quite honestly.

How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't?

I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.

Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.

Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.

To people who don't know me I'm defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.

I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.

I find it difficult to be in rooms now for long periods of time. I can usually take it for about an hour. Then I stride out.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.