The Hollywood Foreign Press have just given me a time out from my 20-year midlife crisis. My heartfelt thanks to them.

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.

I earn the magic of words by writing.I learn the myth of worlds by imagining.

Synchronicity is the soul's reminder of authorship.

Pray FOR positive outcomes, never ON perceived dilemmas

If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.

In France, older women are considered sensual, and they don't have to mask the lines and wrinkles and erase every sign of their life on earth to be attractive and get laid.

I accept full responsibility for what I wrote and apologize to everyone who was offended.

The flame of the diya, or lamp, reminds us that light will ultimately triumph over darkness.

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.

The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'

I think that my sensibilities are becoming slightly less delicate and I'm venturing out in a storytelling world.