It takes years to establish yourself, and then you have one big film and everyone calls you an overnight success. You think, 'Christ, I've been sweating and crying for seven years.'.

I've got a vendetta to destroy the Net, to make everyone go to the library. I love the organic thing of pen and paper, ink on canvas. I love going down to the library, the feel and smell of books.

Whether you're a believer or not, I think there's a huge value in understanding the quality of redemption.

When I was offered the part in Shakespeare In Love a voice in my head said 'not another tights role!

From the age of about five to twelve I was very bad, a hideous little terror who beat people up. I was a member of a Rough Gang - we went around and terrorised all the pupils in school.

I love new writing, new blood, modern works by unknown writers.

I love life. I'm fascinated by human behavior because that feeds back into my work.

I don't know what my limitations are until I reach them. I look for the challenge.

Youth is a predominant factor. We are seeing a young King Arthur, and thereby a young-ish - as I'm into my 40s - Merlin. It was about how to tackle it, from that point view.

I've always believed that you shouldn't want to mend a broken heart, because that's someone you don't want to forget. Scars can be good.

I think religion might throw up a kind of resistance, but I think if one talks about conditioning we can all kind of understand that.

As soon as we conform anything to language, we’ve changed it. Use a word and you’ve altered the world. The poets know this. It’s what they try so hard to avoid.

Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath.

Honesty is about the scars. It's about the blemishes. But it's more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. It's about truly helping people.

The world rushes through us. We are peaceful. We are as deep and black as space. Staring up at the stars, we see only our own image reflected back at us. We are infinite and we are ravenous.

Dear Lord, I pray that my place will never be with the cold, timid souls who do not compete yet criticize, for they never know or feel success or failure.

Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

If you're not satisfied with your life, it's time to invent a new one.

Every great man has become great, every successful man has succeeded, in proportion as he has confined his powers to one particular channel.

A film must have two elements - it must deal with the real world and show how it could be made better.

Probably the most important reason we are seeing more cancers than before is because the population is ageing overall. And cancer is an age-related disease.