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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I don't torture myself.

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 became conflicted in my late teens.

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.

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.

God knows, I haven't always been successful.

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

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

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

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

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

I like to cook things very slowly.

I've got a serious-looking head.

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

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

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