No matter how much technique you draw on or how much training you have, acting is a mystery.

Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.

I'm fully aware that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: 'Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars.

I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.

My singing voice is somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem.

My grandmother was a minister as well, which was not that common in the 1930s.

My looks aren't something that come dazzlingly through in everything I do. I can be made to look one way or the other fairly easily... I am still not recognised on the street that much.

I like playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it's a lot simpler than that: normal people are just not very interesting.

I think everyone is throwing happy stuff at you, and that's when you come over all humbug. It's happy stuff in your face, happy stuff is being sold to you.

Whenever you take on playing a villain, he has to cease to be a villain to you. If you judge this man by his time, he's doing very little wrong.

I always thought the biggest failing of Americans was their lack of irony. They are very serious there! Naturally, there are exceptions... the Jewish, Italian, and Irish humor of the East Coast.

Strive to enrich all lives, hearts and minds not just your own pockets

You have to show reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

Why do all Republicans need Lego hair?

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.

An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.

It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.

...now Eli was my new neighbor. Which was fine with me because I sucked at Math. Math and I were not on speaking terms.