I mean one of the basic rules when you're acting is that you mustn't stand in judgement on a character, you mustn't say Hitler was a bad man because you can't act in that way.

My mother was very agnostic. She would never set foot in the synagogue, she couldn't be doing with it.

Now that we have a democracy and you can go back and the airport air is not laden with evil any more, you can actually breathe oxygen when you land in Johannesburg.

Jews have had to carry around their own sense of self in a carpet bag and I think perhaps too much emphasis might be being put on nationality and on the other hand patriotism, that sort of thing.

And I think that that emphasis on keeping a family together, alike, I think it's important.

Always you find that the more decisive event wins so my father's sort of annual decisiveness which came upon him on the Day of Atonement every year, he suddenly remembered that he was Jewish.

I find its attention to living this life rather than the next one exhilarating because I think even independently of Judaism that that's the right way to go about life.

One tries to be an observer as an actor and indeed as a director because the small things, the give-away things are what are really interesting to a performer.

But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.

I suppose meeting people whether it's in real life and actually shaking their flesh and blood hand or shaking the mystical hand of the character all rub off on you in some way.

I still find that a kind of stricture of the heart happens when I see any form of bigoted or racist behaviour. I get an actual pain in my heart.

Light inside of us can overcome, withstand or overshadow any darkness outside of us

Telling my children was the toughest part. But that's when you get strong, because you have to be strong for other people.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

I've decided I am going to start loving my backside because I don't know anyone who does that. And for my daughter, I want to be able to say to her, 'I love this.'

There are those who give little of the much which they have - and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.

Never yet was a springtime, when the buds forgot to bloom.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

Psychical confidence is the external expression of our internal state of confidence. In simpler terms, it is how confidence looks and sounds.

We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.