If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.

I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.

There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.

I'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.

I've got a serious-looking head.

I like to cook things very slowly.

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.

We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.

Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.

I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.

I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.

God knows, I haven't always been successful.

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.

I don't torture myself.

For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal... has always been the work of other actors.

If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.

I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.

Many years ago, I really didn't know where the next work was coming from.

The last time I was on a small set would've been probably My Left Foot.

I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.

I was a savage for so many years of my life. There was some seed of determination in me that I was not conscious of. I was mostly consciously getting into trouble and drunk.

I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that's never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

I hate wasting people's time.

I find it easier to work when it's quiet.

I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.

How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.

I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.

As a member of the audience I don't like it that I can't see what's going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I'm more than a few rows back. I find it very frustrating.

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.

I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.

A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.

I've been very lucky.

I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was.

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

I'd always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.

I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that's all.

Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.

I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.