I'm a complete technophobe. I can't even email.

Life is just more comfortable if you're honest and open about everything. I spent so many years being in the closet about one thing or another.

The effort of learning. It's the same when you approach any new skill or technique, from a dance step to driving a car. The effort of learning stops you, at first, from doing it well.

Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

What drew me to acting in the first place was disguise.

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.

I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it's all going to be disastrous. That it hasn't all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.

It's good for actors to confront those things we have to act: panic, pain and death.

I don't believe in an afterlife.

I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.

What makes you different is the exact thing that makes you irreplaceable.

I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell.

I think a handwritten letter - a lot of guys don't realize what that means. It's those little romantic touches that tell a lady, "I like a lot of people, but you have a special place in my heart."

Advertising is not a rifle; it is a shotgun, and any campaign featuring outdoor boards of a cartoon animal inevitably will catch children in its spray.

I guess the worst snow was the Kennedy inauguration in 1960. Heavy snow.

We can be of little service to our fellows until we become disillusioned without being embittered.

In the end, as a leader, you are always going to get a combination of two things: what you create and what you allow.

Artists like to talk about what they do with people who've read their books, or seen their films.

A lot of the people that I play with are electronic-based, so there isn't a direct physical analogue between what they're doing and the sound you're hearing.