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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'm not picky, quite honestly.

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.'

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.

Actors should never give interviews.

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

I broke things to get attention.

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

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

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

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.

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

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